Edward Miliband: The charitable sector thinks that the tax rate and the gift aid rate need to be tied together in the long term—and it is right—because it removes the Government's discretion to vary the amount it gets. We need to use the next three years to see whether we should reform the gift aid system further—I welcome any suggestions that he has—and to increase the take-up of gift aid.

Francis Maude: Is it not clear that the belated introduction of the transitional relief on gift aid shows that the income tax changes were simply not thought through? After the kick in the ballot box that the Government received last week, will not Ministers realise that it is now time to set out in detail what relief there will be for the millions of low-paid victims of the 10p tax hike? Is it not unfair to Ministers such as the hapless Communities Secretary to send them out night after night on "Newsnight", unable to answer the most basic questions on that point? When will she be put out of her misery?

Edward Miliband: May I begin by paying to tribute to what started off as my hon. Friend's one-woman campaign for universal free school meals? It is an ingenious campaign, and many people in this House will understand its benefits. I was recently in Hull, where the Labour council introduced free school meals in primary schools for a time, but that was unfortunately abolished by the Liberal Democrats—[Hon. Members: "Shame!"] Well, what would one expect? However, I can tell my hon. Friend that I know that others in Government are looking at this matter, and I hope that they are doing so sympathetically.

Mark Hendrick: I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. Will he join me in congratulating the Ingol and Tanterton Action Group, and in commending it on its work? The group is made up of many young people from Preston who are working in the community to develop many fantastic activities such as summer festivals, internet cafés, coaching in sports activities and DJ workshops. They are also working with older people to generate the intergenerational capacity that we need so much in our communities.

Phil Hope: The charity v was charged with delivering in a variety of ways the resources that we provide, as I described earlier, and with creating match-funding opportunities as well. Some £75 million of the £117 million that v will be delivering has come via the v involved programme. The matched funding target is some £45 million. To date, v has secured more than £32 million in pledges for youth volunteering from the private sector—well on course!

Edward Miliband: The hon. Gentleman has just given the website a good plug. I believe that I have used it, or a similar website, to sponsor someone who was running in the London marathon to raise money for a hospice. The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and we will endeavour to look into whether there is anything more that we can do to help such websites. It is important that the Government do not try to do the task themselves, because independent organisations are doing a very good job.

Phil Hope: The Government will be investing £117 million in youth volunteering through v from 2008-2011. The youth-led volunteering charity v has the mission to inspire 1 million more young people to volunteer. Since its establishment, it has created over 210,000 volunteering opportunities. The national programme that began in April 2008 aims to create 500,000 more volunteering opportunities for young people.

Gordon Brown: Once again, the right hon. Gentleman is proposing to spend money that he does not have. He knows perfectly well that we are putting £1.7 billion into post offices. That is to keep as many post offices open as possible. The London results of the review have just been published, and it has saved some of the post offices in London. But the fact of the matter is that the right hon. Gentleman has no money to be able to keep further post offices open, and he should stop misleading the electorate about what he can and cannot do.

Nicholas Clegg: That is not good enough. This is a matter of principles. Remember those? I think that everybody now knows that when it comes to helping the most needy, the Prime Minister has got no principles and the Tories have got no policies. Will he now provide an absolute guarantee that those who have lost out will be compensated in full, backdated to the beginning of April, and will not have to jump through hoops to claim what is rightfully theirs?

Mike Hall: May I add my condolences to the family of the serviceman killed in Afghanistan on Friday?My right hon. Friend is aware that the fight against crime is ongoing, and when the police introduce proposals to improve the way that we tackle violent crime and terrorism, they should have confidence that policy makers will give those proposals serious consideration. What does my right hon. Friend have to say to those Members of this House who claim to be on the side of the police, but do not back that up when it comes to votes on measures such as the national database on DNA or the imposition of mandatory sentences for rapists and those who carry guns and knives?

Gordon Brown: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We proposed tougher sentences for murder, for sexual and violent offences, and for persistent offenders; indeterminate sentences for anyone who committed serious sexual or violent crime; and five-year minimal custodial sentences for unauthorised possession of firearms. All of those proposals were opposed by the Conservative party.

Michael Mates: Does the Prime Minister recall agreeing with me when I suggested to him a month or two ago that the House was going to need a much better and fuller explanation as to why an increase in time is being sought by the Government for holding people in detention without charge? When is he going to give us that explanation? Would it not be a good time to do so now?

Gordon Brown: That is what the debate at the moment is about. I have appealed to Members of this House to look at the matter so that we can find a consensus. I have said that using the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which some people wish to use for this purpose, would mean going beyond 28 days, but we would have to declare a state of emergency to do so. Many people in this House would be prepared to have a period lasting longer than 28 days, but to do so we would have to declare a state of emergency.
	I and the Government are proposing that we give a power to the House. The Home Secretary, with the Director of Public Prosecutions and the head of the Metropolitan police, would have to come to this House with an order and the House would have to vote a second time as to whether it approved the action to allow someone to be detained for more than 28 days before they were charged. I believe that the safeguards that we have put in place protect the citizen against arbitrary treatment. They include a judge reviewing the detention every seven days, a report by an independent reviewer, the Home Secretary being required to come to the House and a final report on how the procedure had been adopted. Those are the protections for civil liberties that people have asked for. But I have to take the advice of other people who tell me that it is important for us to have a precautionary power in place so that, if there were a multiple incident, we could go beyond 28 days with the approval of the House.
	I have looked at terrorist incidents over the past few years, and I have looked at the sophistication of terrorists who are using multiple passports, multiple telephone numbers and multiple e-mailing facilities. If there was a plot involving a number of people, we would need more than 28 days to review all the evidence. I believe that most sensible people in this House, as well as most members of the general public, support that position, and I hope that the House votes for it.

Gordon Brown: It is vitally important that all Departments and their agencies work closely together to deliver the homes needed in Kettering and elsewhere. It is precisely because we need to ensure that new housing is not built in isolation and that it is delivered with transport infrastructure, utilities and public services that we have allocated over the next three years £1.7 billion for infrastructure in growth areas and new growth points. Northamptonshire has received £59 million. Since 2003, the Government have allocated in total over £250 million to Northamptonshire, made up of various growth area, community infrastructure and transport funds. This has been possible because we have been able to expand public spending.

Gordon Brown: I am grateful for the work that is done by the police authority and the police in my hon. Friend's area. The Home Secretary will be making a statement on this matter just after Question Time. It is generally agreed that the quantity and the type of cannabis being sold on the streets of our cities, and the threat that it poses to mental health of many of the people using it, make it necessary that we look at this matter again. I believe that the recommendations that the Home Secretary will put forward will be in line not only with what the public want to see, but with what the police want to see. I believe that the House will be pleased that she is also taking new measures for enforcement that will be welcome in all parts of the country.

Si�n Simon: Do people want the right to see their doctors in the evenings and at weekends, or are the Tories right to scrap that right to choice and turn the clock back?

David Davis: I thank the Home Secretary for giving me advance sight of her statement. First, may I say that I fully support the Government's decision to upgrade the classification of cannabis to class B, even if their decision to do so has come rather late? The Government's historically lax approach to drugs has been a hallmark of our broken society under Labour. The UK has the worst level of overall drug abuse in Europe. Drug crimes have increased by almost a half under this Government, and Britain has the highest rate of teenage cannabis abuse in the European Union. We all hope that today's statement means that the Government now recognise that cannabis is a very dangerous drugthat it wrecks lives, is a gateway to harder drug abuse and fuels crime.
	Let us examine the hard facts. As the Home Secretary intimated, since the 1970s the strongest psychiatrically damaging component of cannabisTHChas increased by about four or five times in skunk cannabis, and the other chemical composition of the cannabis may have altered in a way to exacerbate the psychiatric harm. A survey of 35 studies published in  The Lancet medical journal concluded that modern cannabis users are 40 per cent. more likely to develop psychotic illness. Certainly the number of anti-psychotic drugs prescribed to young people has doubled in the last decade.
	Much of this information has been known for years, so does the Home Secretary accept that, on the grounds of psychiatric damage alone, the 2004 decision was an utterly avoidable mistake? The Government's decision in January 2004 to downgrade cannabis sent out precisely the wrong message, by encouraging the public and impressionable young people to believe that cannabis did not cause serious harm and would not be taken seriously by the police.
	Last week, the Prime MinisterI am glad to see that he is still presentsaid about cannabis-taking that
	we really have got to send out a message to young peoplethis is not acceptable.
	Does the Home Secretary accept that the downgrading of cannabis by her predecessor in 2004 sent entirely the wrong message both young to people and to the police force? Does she recognise the fact that since that reckless decision, the number of cannabis factories, to which she referred, has more than doubled? Furthermore, the number of adults treated for cannabis abuse has increased by 51 per cent.; hospital admissions for mental illness connected with cannabis have risen by nearly a quarter; and cannabis has served as a gateway to even more harmful drugs, with class A drug abuse increasing by 43 per cent. in the past year alone. Does she accept that the effect of the policy change has been to increase the size of the cannabis market and to damage, if not destroy, many more young lives?
	This long-awaited U-turn has followed delay, dithering and indecision, when the country cries out for leadership. As the Prime Minister is sitting here, I have a question for him. He announced his intentions on this policy a year ago, but in the meantime, he wasted a year by handing it to an advisory body, which he has now ignored. The Home Secretary told us in her statement that that was required by statutebut I am unaware of any statute that required them to take a year to consider evidence that has been around for half a decade. On the Home Secretary's own figures, 2,000 new cannabis factories will have started up during that delay, and thousands of young people will have become addicted to cannabis unnecessarily. In due course, many will end up on hard drugs or in hospital unnecessarily, all because this Government could not make up their mind.

Jacqui Smith: I welcome the right hon. Gentleman's support for my statement. However, I must take issue with his suggestion that somehow or other, we have taken a lax approach to drugs in this country over the past 10 years: we have not. That is why drug use is falling; that is why we have doubled the number of people able to get drug treatment; and that is why, as a result, the acquisitive crime most closely linked to drug use has fallen by 20 per cent. All that is due to the decisions and the success not only of the Government's drugs strategy, but of many people working in both law enforcement and drug treatment services. They should be recognised for their efforts in supporting that strategy,
	I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the links to mental health. It is precisely the relationship between the increased strength of cannabis, particularly skunk, and, as the advisory council points out, the potential future danger of young people, in particular, binge smoking it, and the uncertainty, at least, about the resulting impact on their mental health that have driven today's decision.
	However, the right hon. Gentleman then accuses the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs of delaying the decision. That body was set up under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and when considering the reclassification of a drug, it is a statutory requirement to take advice from it. As I said in my statement, I thank the advisory council not only for the 21 recommendations that it has made today, the vast majority of which I support and we will implement, but for the careful way in which it took evidence, not only from large numbers of professionals and academics, but from the public, 58 per cent. of whom agreed with the decision that we are taking today. The right hon. Gentleman may wish to rush to decisions and to throw out such important processes and evidence gathering, but I do not believe that other people do.
	Finally, I must mention the right hon. Gentleman's brass neck when he referred back to the 2004 decision. I must give him his due, because he has probably always taken a consistent approach to the reclassification of cannabis

Paul Flynn: This will be hailed as another tough policybut sadly, tough policies have never worked. We have the worst drug problem in Europe, alongside the harshest penalties. I urge my right hon. Friend to look at the new convention on drugs accepted by the Council of Europe, which seeks to move the emphasis away from the criminal justice system and locking people up for using drugs, towards systems that workthe health outcomes. We have a good record in recent years in concentrating on the health outcomes, but we have had 37 years of tough policies. When can we have an intelligent policy?

Angela Watkinson: Now that the Home Secretary has taken this important decision, may I urge her to consult the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and leading campaigners against the illegal use of drugs among children? They should look carefully at how drugs education in schools can be improved, so that young people get real warnings about the consequences of drug use. Will she also take a fresh look at the website FRANK? Sometimes it can trivialise the subject, and make it look like a bit of a joke.

Jacqui Smith: I have already discussed the matter with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. The hon. Lady is right that we need to improve drugs education in our schools, and we said as much in the drugs strategy. However, I disagree with her about FRANK: the site has had considerable success in getting traction with young people, and in increasing the proportion of young people who recognise that there is a link between cannabis and mental health problems. Sometimes, advertising campaigns that are not convincing for those of us of a certain age nevertheless work on those for whom they are intended.

Jacqui Smith: The hon. Gentleman makes two fair points. First, we certainly need to look at the FRANK campaign to make sure that the increased strength of cannabis is fully represented in it; he is right about that. Secondly, I will ensure that the Crown Prosecution Service hears his words about the requirement not to bury a cannabis offence, even if it is the lesser of two drugs offences.

Bob Russell: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the immigration rules in connection with the requirements for indefinite leave to enter and remain in the United Kingdom as a Gurkha discharged from the British Army.
	The Gurkhas have a unique place in the history of our country and in the hearts of the British people. For around 200 years they, the bravest of the brave, have served Britain with outstanding courage and loyalty. They continue to play a vital role in today's Army, both at home and overseas. Indeed, only a few weeks ago Prince Harry paid tribute to their role in Afghanistan. Today, about 3,000 Gurkhas serve in Her Majesty's armed forces. That represents more than 3 per cent. of the British Army. Our under-strength, overstretched forces would be in a more difficult situation if it were not for the Gurkhas, yet despite their astonishing service, many former Gurkhas are treated disgracefully. To the shame of this country, Gurkhas who left the Army before 1997 are not allowed to stay in the United Kingdom.
	My Bill seeks to amend the Immigration Act 1971 to enable Gurkhas to be granted indefinite leave to enter and remain in the UK under the category of Gurkha discharged from the British Army. It is a small, simple Bill, but one which would speak volumes. It has support in all parts of the House. To their credit, in 2004 the Government introduced changes that benefit today's Gurkhas; that is appreciated. Those who retire from the Army can now stay in the UK should they so wish, but the changes do not apply to those who left prior to 1997, because it is claimed that before that date they were based in Hong Kong and therefore were not fully part of the UK forces. That is outrageous nonsense and an insult to men who served in Her Majesty'sin some cases, His Majesty'sarmed forces, serving the UK's interests in many parts of the world.
	It is argued, somewhat insultingly, that Gurkhas who retired before 1997 could not generally show strong enough links to the UK. The hollowness and callousness of that arbitrary cut-off date was illustrated in the most powerful way when Victoria cross winner Tul Bahadur Pun was initially denied entry to this country, although he is a man whose loyalty and service to the UK was recognised with the award of the VC for his action in single-handedly storming a Japanese machine-gun post during the second world war, in the face of intense machine-gun fire. That act of bravery was not unique. There are countless other stories of the bravery of Gurkha soldiers who never served in Hong Kong.
	Most of our constituents have great affection for the Gurkhas. That is certainly the case in the garrison town of Colchester. I am confident that constituents share my view that the 1997 cut-off date is not morally acceptable. To add insult to injury, retired Gurkhas living in the UK now face deportation, yet soldiers from Commonwealth countries can be granted the right to UK citizenship after only four years' service.
	The moral case for the provisions set out in my Bill, which has all-party support, is best illustrated with the following example. Mr. Madam Gurung served in the British Army for 24 years. He retired in 1993 and applied for the right to live in the UK, but his application was refused by the Home Office. All that he wants to do is to work as a bus driver or security guard here in the UK. He currently lives in one-bedroom accommodation in Tonbridge, where he is awaiting news of his appeal. He is prevented by law from working, and subsists on handouts from concerned friends. Is that how a man who served in the British Army for 24 years should be treated? Many other former Gurkhas are going through the same tortuous process of immigration appeals. They are destitute, in limbo, never sure of their future. Forbidden from working, they are not even second-class citizens in the country that they served so loyally for many years. They are relying on the charity of friends, comrades and neighbours. It is a disgrace that some of our former soldiers have been condemned to such a life.
	In any survey or poll, the massively overwhelming majority of citizens want the right to British citizenship extended to the pre-1997 retirees. The retired Gurkha community in this country is hard-working and entrepreneurial. The Government need have no fears about them in any way being a drain on the public purse. The reverse is the casethey would be net contributors. Experience in areas where they have settled clearly shows that their hard work and high standards of citizenship add positively to our economy and our culture. The numbers involved are small given the number of people who annually migrate to the UK. It is estimated that there are about 1,000 retired Gurkhas in the UK awaiting results of appeals. Back in Nepal, it is considered that most elderly retired Gurkhas would wish to remain living there. According to best estimates, the maximum number of retired Gurkhas who may possibly want to come here is under 10,000.
	British people are frustrated and angered by the unfairness. They do not understand why the Government will not allow a relatively small number of people, all of whom have served in the British Army for a number of years, to live here. The sentiments and provisions of the Bill transcend party politics. The Gurkhas enjoy wide support across the House and the nation. The situation is becoming more urgent by the day. A few weeks ago, outside Parliament, I and some other Members witnessed 50 retired Gurkhas handing in their long service and good conduct medals in protest at the way in which they are being treated. There was extensive coverage of the event in newspapers and on television. The sight of such loyal, brave and dignified people being pushed to such a desperate act filled me with shame.
	The Bill seeks to give voice to what I believe is the will of the British people. Let the Gurkhas stay! I commend the Bill to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Bob Russell, Miss Ann Widdecombe, Mr. Don Touhig, Nick Harvey, Patrick Mercer, Mr. Paul Keetch, Mr. Paul Burstow, Mr. David Drew, Andrew Mackinlay, Andrew Rosindell, Mark Pritchard and Mr. Bruce George.

Francis Maude: I beg to move,
	That this House notes with concern the Government's management of the Civil Service; condemns the excessive increase in the Government's spending on communications, advertising and marketing; further notes with alarm the increasing number of civil servants employed as press and communications officers despite the aims of the Gershon Review to reduce the administrative costs of Government; observes the increase in the number of political ministerial adviser appointees; further notes the creation of bodies and quangos which are unaccountable to the public; considers there to be widespread failures in the efficient implementation of Government policies by No. 10 Downing Street, Government departments and agencies; and calls on the Government to enshrine Civil Service independence in law in a Civil Service Act, bring in a strengthened Ministerial Code and a more transparent means of enforcing it, ask the Committee on Standards in Public Life to establish a code of conduct for the impartiality and accuracy of Government publications and advertising campaigns, and to take urgent steps to restore trust in the UK system of government by making it more efficient, transparent, accountable and effective.
	I start by declaring the interests against my name in the Register of Members' Interests.
	The Tony Blair era of Government became synonymous with spin. At the very outset of that Government back in 1997, there were huge increases in the number of special advisers; the figure more than doubled. Two special advisers in Downing street were given, completely without precedent, powers to give orders to conventional civil servants. In addition, a large number of departmental press secretaries who were already in place, and departmental heads of the information service who were permanent civil servants in the Government Information and Communication Service, were replaced with appointees who were more or less partisan.
	At the time, eyebrows were raised and mildly controversial concerns were expressed, but after all, the Government were elected with a substantial majority and nothing that was done could be said to be illegal. However, it was nakedly a sharp turn away from the conventional approach of reliance on an impartial and professional civil service. That became the hallmark of the Blair era of governmentthe subordination of all considerations to the partisan political interests of the Labour party. In no Department was there a greater dedication to the cult of spin than in Her Majesty's Treasury. We all rememberI do so vividly, as I was shadow Chancellor: one of many holders of that postthe notorious double-counted spending increases in the pre-Budget report of autumn 1998, in which spending increases for the whole comprehensive spending review period were conveniently added together to give a sum much greater than that which was being spent. That was the first indication that with the then Chancellornow Prime Ministerit was wise to count the spoons carefully and decipher the fine print with a magnifying glass before deciding to rely on what he said.
	Despite that history, it is fair to say that when the Prime Minister took office in the middle of last year, there was a sigh of relief that the first announcement of the age of change was that the era of spin was definitively over. Parliament, we were told, was to be told about things before the press and the media. Spin was consigned to historya relic of the Blairite-Mandelsonist era of the past. The right hon. Gentleman said that
	one of my first acts as Prime Minister would be to restore power to Parliament in order to build the trust of the British people in our democracy.
	At the time, the soon to be elected deputy leader of the Labour partynow the Leader of the Housemade an even more explicit promise:
	In future, under a Gordon Brown regime, we need to have no spin, no briefing, no secrets, and respect for Parliament.
	The right hon. and learned Lady's final point about treating Parliament with respect and making statements to the House before the media was instantly more honoured in the breach than in the observance. We have worked out that on average, the media have been briefed about two announcements a week before they are made to Parliament. Often, announcements are not made to Parliament at all, even after the event.
	What of the pledge to cut back on spin, and put the era of spin in the past? The simple truth is that there has been no reduction in the number of spin doctors and special advisers from the Blair era, or perhaps only a tiny one. The age of change turns out to be the age of no change. The publication of the White Book by the Central Office of Information, which was delayed until September last year to take account of the changes since the Prime Minister took over from Tony Blair, effectively shows that there has been no reduction at all. In fact, it took some time for the document to be published, and a number of questions from my right hon. Friends and myself to elicit that information. Indeed, the Government's answers, to specific questions, Department by Department, on the scale of the spin machine are a master-class in the spinning of information to give a false impression. They exclude, for example, the majority of communications personnel, limiting the numbers to the narrowest possible definition of press officer.
	The White Book directory tells the full story of a Government spin machine that has spiralled out of control. Advertising costs have also spiralled. The Government have spent over 800 million on advertising in the past five years alone. The annual spend has quadrupled since Labour came to power. No doubt under the rigorous financial stewardship of the Prime Minister, assisted by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as his adviser for much of the time, it was spent immensely prudently. Is the advertising spend simply the overhang of the reckless Blairite era? No, because the figures clearly show that since the Prime Minister took over, the advertising spend has increased still further by four times the rate of inflation.
	Taxpayers are entitled to ask whether they are getting a good return on the money that is being spent. Many Conservative council candidates who fought elections last week may think it was well spent, because the results were not bad for them. Even taxpayers who belong to, or support, the Labour party are asking that question because, after all, Labour's electoral interests were clearly intended to benefit from those huge spends, including on advertising to promote the merits of neighbourhood policing in the middle of the local election campaign. That is a questionable use of taxpayers' money in supposedly non-partisan information programmes.
	The results of last week's elections suggest that, from the Labour party's point of view, it was a wretched use of money, because it ledI believe directlyto its worst position since the war; I do not mean the last war but the first world war. We have to go back a very long time indeed to the infancy of the Labour party to find a time when it did as badly as it did last week.
	It is worth spending a little time looking at the Prime Minister's explanation last weekend of what went wrong, because it bears directly on the substance of today's motion. He said,
	I've spent too much time...looking at the detail of solving people's problems.
	He also said,
	I've spent too little time thinking about how we can get our arguments across.
	He was saying that the Government were not doing enough spinning; they were spending their time earnestly looking over the fine detail of policy programmes to be absolutely sure that they had got them right. That was supposed to conjure up an image of an incredibly high-minded Prime Minister blundering around Downing street in the small hours of the morning, setting off security alarms while trying to unlock his office, because he was desperate to refine subsection (27)(a) of the bin charges Bill, or to rewrite paragraph 147 of his Chancellor's Budget speech, or to work out with mathematical precision exactly why 42 days' detention without charge was the right answer, rather than 40 or 44.
	For somebody supposedly obsessed with substance, as the Prime Minister constantly tells us at the Dispatch Box, and the detail of solving people's problems, he has not made a fantastically good fist of it. Abolishing the 10p tax rate was entirely his idea; indeed, it was his idea to create it in the first place. However, when it came to be implemented

Francis Maude: Those units are meant to be accountable to the Prime Minister, but the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster may want to comment on that when he speaks. The creation of all those central departments with hundreds of personnel in them was the result of the warfare going on between the Treasury and Downing street. Because the Chancellor, as he then was, was constantly building up the Treasury's own resource to stamp his authority over the whole of domestic policy, Tony Blair was constantly trying to counter that by creating countervailing units at the centre of government. The result was that the whole thing spiralled out of control, and there are thousands at the centre of government who were not there before.
	One of the things that I remember from the way the Government operated in the 1980s, when I was junior Minister, was that, as my right hon. and hon. Friends who were there at the time will remember, No. 10 operated with quite a strong grip over the way the Government worked, with a private office of half a dozen and a policy unit of 10. It did not need delivery units or huge numbers [Interruption.] I hear the Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Corby (Phil Hope), talking about substance. We constantly hear complaints from the Government that we are not engaging on substance. I am concerned with exactly the issues of substance. The Government are so obsessed with spin that they are consistently getting the answers wrong on major issues of huge importance to the public.
	Look at the proposal on capital gains tax in the Budget, announced with such certainty in the pre-Budget report. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor had rapidly to find the reverse gear when the detail turned out, once again, not to have been thought through. The same with the proposal on non-domsanother humiliating U-turn when the package fell apart. Screening for clostridium difficile in January

Julian Lewis: Is it not a sign of the time and of the truth of the case that my right hon. Friend is making that these days, when one wants to find out what is going on in 10 Downing street, one does not look at the leaks to the political correspondents in the national press, but one looks for the exclusive stories that seem to come up in  PRWeek? Does that not say it all? It is all in the public relations sphere now, not in the political correspondents' sphere.

Francis Maude: My hon. Friend is right. It makes one smile when one hears the Prime Minister criticising us for slick salesmanship. There is a certain amount of envy, I think, when he says that, because the salesmanship from him has not yet reached that pinnacle. No doubt with all those advisers coming in, it will. That indicates the direction in which the Government are going under the new Prime Minister. There is more emphasis on spin than was the case before.

Andrew Tyrie: First, there was full transparency in the role of advisers, and secondly, the decision by the Labour Government to start issuing such details was only squeezed out of them after I and a number of others had pressed them vigorously for several years, and the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, finally agreed to provide some of the basic information being demanded.

Edward Miliband: The current norm is that most Cabinet Ministers, including myself, have two special advisers. I do not think that that is an excessive number, but we can probably debate that.
	Another important aspect of this debate is that special advisers are not a threat to the impartiality of the civil servicein fact, they help to protect its impartiality because they can do political things that it would not be right for civil servants to do. That is why the Cabinet Secretary said at the Public Administration Committee last week
	this point about good special advisers being good for the civil service is really important.
	I say to the House, in all genuineness, that on special advisers and on other aspects of the Bill, we look forward to detailed scrutiny by this House, and even perhaps to some constructive suggestions.

Edward Miliband: I agree with my hon. Friend to a certain extent.
	Let me try to illustrate what I mean by the golden age-ism to which I referred; I am certainly not accusing my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) of that. Hayden Phillips, a former permanent secretary, has written about how, as a junior civil servant in the Home Office in the 1960s, he was told by his division head not to visit a police force to discuss policy as
	it will prevent you from being properly detached.
	In a way, that illustrates one of the challenges for the civil service, which is to have greater awareness of delivery. A 2004 survey found that 60 per cent. of senior civil servants described their background as policy making, compared with just 25 per cent. in delivery. The current Cabinet Secretary, Gus O'Donnell, is trying to put more of an emphasis on delivery among senior, and indeed junior, civil servants so that they do not just spend time just on policy in Whitehall but go out to see what is happening on the ground. That is incredibly important. The first challenge that the civil service needs to rise to is that of civil servants having experience of delivery.
	The second challenge is to do more to reflect the face of Britain. There has been progress in recent years on the number of women and ethnic minorities in the civil service, but it is still not good enoughthe numbers are still too low. The proportion of senior civil servants who are from minority ethnic backgrounds has doubled since 1997, but it is still too low. The proportion of women has doubled, but it is still too low. I gather that the proportion of new permanent secretaries who went to state schools has doubled, but that is probably still too low as well. Labour Members think that there is further to go and that this is an important challenge for the civil service if it is to recruit the most talented, regardless of background.

Chris Bryant: One of the reasons why there is great value in bringing private and voluntary sector people into the civil service, and in giving civil servants an opportunity to go out and come back in, is that the private and voluntary sectors tend to move much faster. They can be much more responsive to local conditions and situations and not so hidebound in their approach. Sometimes I feel that civil servants, as much as they might want to be helpful, can put roadblocks in the way of progress.

Edward Miliband: I could never possibly suggest that, but I take my hon. Friend's point. Innovation and an ability to take risks are the big challenges facing the civil service. I borrow something once said by the leader of the Conservative party about an end to Punch and Judy politics. If we are honest, part of the barrier to civil servants, Ministers and others taking risks is the sort of political and media climate in which we live. That is not to blame the media, but we need a more risk-taking culture throughout the public sector. Some things will go wrong as a result, but we would have more innovation and more things that went right and we would make a real difference to people's lives. I do not have a holy grail solution to that problem, but it is a challenge for all of us.
	We have further to go. There is an important challenge for the civil service, if it is to recruit the most talented regardless of background. We have set up board-level diversity champions throughout Whitehall to help to make that happen, and put in place a number of other measures to encourage diversity.
	My third point about civil service reform and making the service more open is the idea, already referred to, of outsiders coming in. I am not romanticising that idea or saying that everyone who comes from the private sector or elsewhere will be better than current permanent civil servantsabsolutely notbut it is a healthy thing that the proportion of the senior civil service recruited from outside has increased by a quarter over the past four years, from 18 to 23 per cent. That is one of the three big challenges for the civil service.
	I pay tribute to the Cabinet Secretary, who has launched, in the face of some natural scepticism, capability reviews looking at the capabilities of Departments. I see that the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) is raising his eyebrows. It is right to introduce those reviews because they will help to improve the quality of administration in our country. The process will always give ammunition for an irresponsible Opposition, but that is just one of those things. It is the right thing to do and it will improve the quality of policy making in this country.
	I have tried to describe our approach to the issues. We want to embed an impartial civil service. Our approach is part of a continuing programme of constitutional reform andnotwithstanding the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Horshamthis Government, under the current Prime Minister, have a lot to be proud of with regard to what we are doing on constitutional renewal. The Constitutional Renewal Bill will make a difference to the way we are governed. For example, the innovation of pre-appointment scrutiny is a major departure for this House. A significant number of public appointmentsI am in discussion with the Liaison Committee about the precise numberwhere a Minister decides on an individual will go before a Select Committee before they are confirmed so that testimony can be given, and the House will be able to report on that process. I hope that the House will use that responsibility wisely, because it is a big departure for our system of government to have the Executive held to account in this way, but it is the right thing to do. Many of the people we are talking about, from the Information Commissioner to the commissioner for public appointments play a significant role in holding the Executive to account on a whole range of appointments and in acting on behalf of the public.
	We have a good programme of constitutional reform, but we do not want to preserve the civil service in aspic. It needs to evolve on the bedrock of impartiality. I end by saying to the right hon. Member for Horsham that despite his speech, I hope he will engage seriously with our programme of constitutional renewal, including the civil service Bill. I say with all sincerity that we will take any constructive suggestions from him or his colleagues on how that Bill can be improved. We will continue to modernise and strengthen the civil service so that it can meet the priorities of the people of this country.

Susan Kramer: I have to admit to a surreal moment: when the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) was speaking, I wondered whether I was in the right debate on the right day.
	We are willing to support the motion because at its heart is a further urging of the Government to introduce a civil service Bill that will enshrine in statute the impartiality of the civil service. It is obviously not a subject that has set the House on fire, as we can see from the attendance today. I suspect, however, that is not because of a lack of interest in the topic, but because the issue has been ongoing for so long that resilience concerning the hope of a civil service Bill has been worn down by repeated false pregnancies. All three major parties included a promise of a civil service Bill in their 1997 manifestos. Extensive discussions took place in 2001 and 2002, and there were two forms of draft Bill in 2004. There is great hope that we will finally see a Bill next year, but I hope that we shall hear some conviction on the part of the Minister for the Cabinet Office, and that there will not be a rerun of our past experiences.
	I do not think that it really takes seven years to draft appropriate language for a civil service Bill. Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that it was most convenient for the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, not to have that sort of legislation on the statute book, so the issue drifted through discussion and consultation without getting anywhere. I believe that the willingness to introduce legislation now is meant to be part of the Brown fightbackbut I am not fussy. If we can get decent legislation, I do not care what the motive for it is. It is just important that we get good-quality legislation to enshrine and protect the civil service, and to make sure that it remains respected and effective in the future. However we get that, I will be pleased.
	I have to say, however, that it must be a good Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (David Howarth), when looking at the early drafts, used the phrase nibbling at the edges. There is an awful lot of work left to do on the Bill, and I congratulate the Public Administration Committee on taking on much of the challenge of scrutinising, questioning, monitoring and improving the quality of what we hope will be legislation in the not-too-distant future. We are left with a number of questions, which the House would like the Secretary of State to answer. I am struggling to understand why the Civil Service Commission should not be appointed and removable by Parliament, instead of being appointed by the Government. I believe that the Public Administration Committee has made a similar recommendation, and such a change would be the best guarantor of political neutrality. It would also be significant in stemming the constant tipping away of power from Parliament to Government. It would be an important step towards an appropriate rebalance.
	There are all sorts of lesser questions. Why should the commission not be able to initiate its own inquiries into breaches of the code of conduct? It strikes me as most peculiar that one should need the Government's permission to undertake an investigation of the Government. The issue of recruitment on the basis of merit was mentioned. That is obviously crucial, but should not the same standards apply to promotion or movement within the civil service? It is beyond me why that was not included. We heard a quite a discussion on the issue of seconded staff a few moments ago, and on the various ways in which such secondment takes place.
	I think that the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) touched on the general issue, especially with short-term secondments, of what mechanisms are in place to ensure that the public service ethos remains dominant when people are brought in from a business culture, which is very different. I am not saying that one cannot learn from the other, or that exchange is not beneficial. However, on 10 November 2005, Lord Butler of Brockwell told the Public Administration Committee that that sort of transfer of people
	needs to be accompanied by safeguards
	against business ethics damaging civil service ethics. I have yet to perceive that sort of understanding in the draft legislation.

Susan Kramer: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I do not subscribe to the notion that one is a scumbag if one has spent one's life in business, and a wunderkind if one has done so in public service. However, having been part of both worlds, I am conscious of the differences in culture. It is not necessarily an easy translation from one to the other. I believe that the business community can be tempted to perceive the process of secondment not as a strategy to help public service perform better but as an easier route to influencing and shaping. That might apply not to the individuals but to the companies from which they are seconded. I do not claim that that necessarily happens, but we should consider the possibility when we manage the process.
	Earlier, I mentioned promotion and movement in the civil service through merit and open competition. I struggle to understand why that should not form the basis of every appointment that is not of a special adviser, instead of excluding several posts. I hope that the Minister for the Cabinet Office will tackle that. Seventy is the figure that constantly floats around for the number special advisers. That venerable journal  PRWeek, which has dominated the debate, reported on 24 April that hordes of senior Labour special advisers were said to be passing their CVs to head-hunters and recruitment consultants amid concern that their stock was falling. Perhaps the number will fall below 70. However, that number of people, with a great deal of influence and power, can have an impact on the behaviour of several thousand. It is silly to suggest that 70 people cannot overwhelm the civil service.
	What limit should we set? Why is not there a cap or some negotiated mechanism for limiting the number? If 70 is fine, is 700 fine, or is that ridiculous? Should the number be 100? Whatever it should be, having some sort of cap would give Parliament and the public confidence that special advisers were used on an as needed basis to execute the Government's mission, and were limited to such roles.
	Although the Minister for the Cabinet Office implied that special advisers had no line management responsibility, the draft Bill does not specify that. It would therefore be good to include the prohibition of line management on the face of the Bill. Of course special advisers can commission work, and many people perceive that, if it is misused, as a form of line management. I fully accept that the Government do not intend to include a provision to repeat the Order in Council that enabled Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell to be appointed with special executive powers. However, taking that a stage further to ensure that there is no loophole for commissioning to spill over would be useful.
	So far, I have considered the civil service largely in the abstract. However, those of us who have been involved in the battle over Heathrow are worried about the creeping loss of neutrality in the civil service. The hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening), through her diligent pursuit of freedom of information requests, has exposed an incredible amount of integration and co-operation between BAA and the Department for Transport in presenting what is supposedly an impartial consultation to the people of south-west London on an issue about which people care enormously. There is a genuine sense that, in its determination to pursue a Government objective, the civil service suspended its independent judgment and allowed itself to be overridden by BAA's preferences and biases.
	Some hon. Members will remember that in 2002, my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) requested information from the Government about disabled people in hospital, and was told that it was unavailable. Through the Data Protection Act 1998, he obtained a draft answer, which made it clear that the information was available and that he had been given an incorrect response. The Government apologised to the Speaker and to my hon. Friend for that, but the House and the Public Administration Committee had to pursue them before that could be achieved. Frankly, hon. Members will not go through that sort of exercise. We must ensure that the responsiveness is there from the beginning.
	To speak personally and poignantly, I lost several acquaintances on 11 September 2001and I will never get beyond the behaviour of special adviser Jo Moore, who said:
	It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.
	That conveys a genuine warning, which underscores the importance of getting the Bill right. Jo Moore was in a running battle with the civil service elements of the press office in her Department, in an arena where one would have thought that such a clash of values should never occur.
	The Conservatives do not get off lightly. For all their claims that there was a golden age under a Conservative Government, the Thatcher era sowed the seeds. On 24 May 2007, Lord Lipsey, a widely respected Labour peer, who spent many years in the civil service said:
	The present generation of civil servants grew up in the Thatcher years, when the question, 'Is he one of us?' resounded around Whitehall, and giving your opinion fully and frankly could be a barrier to advancement.[ Official Report, House of Lords, 24 May 2007; Vol. 692, c. 772.]
	In many ways, Blair and Campbell were the true heirs of Thatcher and Ingham.
	I was only on the sidelines of politics at the time, but many of us remember Jeremy Paxman's questioning of the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), when he was Home Secretary, about whether he had improperly overruled Derek Lewis, the director general of the Prison Service. There is, therefore, no clean slate.
	The motion refers to quangos, and although I personally agree with its language, it took me aback for a moment, because when it comes to the pot calling the kettle black, the Tory policy of establishing an NHS boardthe mother of all quangosto be responsible for commissioning NHS services, allocating NHS resources and delivering objectives to improve outcomes for patients, is extraordinary. I therefore hope that the language in the motion will be conveyed over into Tory policy.
	A call for senior appointments to quangos to be subject to scrutiny by the relevant Commons Select Committee is missing from the motion and the draft Bill. That is an especially important element to returning to parliamentary control and giving the public confidence in the impartiality and objectivity of the services that are delivered to them.
	Some people think that our focus on the impartiality of the civil service is a little piece of nonsense. Indeed, there is envy of the US system, which is openly politicised and where the winner takes the spoils, as it were. However, having lived for many years in the United States, I think that those people have completely missed the checks and balances, which are an inherent part of the US system, between the judiciary, the Executive and the legislature, which mean that an entirely different set of issues are confronted. In our parliamentary system, not having the impartiality of the civil service carefully enshrined in law would totally upset the balance of power. If we ever wanted to guarantee the potential for a presidential Prime Minister, that would do it.
	Let me close by saying that it is about time that the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854, which established the principle of a permanent, independent and politically neutral civil service, found its way on to the statute book. Something in excess of 150 years is probably a long enough gestation period for any piece of legislation.

Tony Wright: That is an interesting observation. I was trying to argue that although such charges are made for political reasons in each period of government, they do not stand up when tested against the question whether the character of the civil service is being fundamentally altered by what is happening.
	The Select Committee on Public Administration, which I have the honour to chair, considered this issue in some detail just a year ago. We produced a report called Politics and Administration: Ministers and Civil Servants, which examined the politicisation charges made over the years. It is worth quoting a paragraph that sums up the evidence that we received. We said that:
	despite the regular accusations of politicisation, Britain clearly remains singularly unpoliticised. External appointments to the senior civil service are regulated by the Civil Service Commissioners, and no witnesses suggested ministers were able to exercise significant powers of patronage. Although ministers are able to make political appointments to special adviser posts, there was broad agreement that the scale of political appointments was so small, in relation to the size of the civil service, that it did not undermine principles set out by the 1854 Northcote Trevelyan Report and, in significant respects, protected them. Moreover, in relation to appointments to public bodies, the role of ministers has actually been reduced by recent changes.
	That is an accurate summary, and shows why the general charge of politicisation, whether under Conservative or Labour Governments, simply is not sustainable.
	In any serious discussion on this issue, it is worth discussing the appropriate balance between the political element in government and the permanent element. It is worth having that discussion here and in any comparable political system, and there would be different answers for the different systems, all of which claim to uphold the principles of democratic politics. I remember being introduced to the Australian Cabinet Secretary, some years ago, and discovering that he was a political appointee. In Canadaanother Commonwealth countrythe permanent secretaries, whom they call deputy ministers, are all political appointees.
	What is the correct balance between the political and permanent bureaucratic elements of government? That question can be answered in a variety of ways, and is always open to dispute. Internationally, we are at an extreme end of that spectrum, with our small element of political appointment within government. Given the arguments about this issue that we have had in this country over the years, one would think that we were right at the other end of the spectrum. Extraordinary attention has been paid to the appointment of special advisers over the years, but there is minute political involvement in government here.
	To return to my comments about radical reforming Governments sometimes revisiting the issue, the case is sometimes made for changing the balance fundamentally. That argument was put forward by Sir John Hoskyns, who ran Mrs. Thatcher's policy unit for the first three years of her Conservative Government. He was an interesting manone of Mrs. Thatcher's business men and can-do people whom she brought in. He spent a year working out exactly how Britain was governed and what the problems were with that method, and put his findings in a diagram. When Mrs. Thatcher was shown the diagramshe was a chemist, as we knowshe said that it looked exactly like the plan of a chemical plant.
	John Hoskyns was impatient about the balance between the political and civil service elements, and wanted to change it. After he left that job, he said:
	If a country's problems require radical remedies, you need a radical government. But how can you have a radical government without radically-minded officials?
	He went on to say:
	We need to replace a large number of senior civil servants with politically appointed officials on contract, at proper market rates, so that experienced, top-quality people would be available.
	I did not give that quote simply to make a political point, to damn that political period or to revisit matters that provide a political opportunity. There is a perfectly proper argument to be had about the balance between the political element in government and the permanent civil service element. All political systems have that discussion, as we do. We allow exemptions to appointment on merit through secondments and short-term contracts, and we could have a grown-up discussion about such matters if we wanted to.
	In recommending a civil service Bill in 1854, Northcote and Trevelyan said in their report:
	a few clauses would accomplish all that is proposed
	They were right. My Committee has always taken the view that we do not want an over-elaborate Bill. We want one that is as simple as possible and that tries to set some of the constitutional boundary lines into statute. We want a move from a rule by prerogative to one of Parliament and statute. That is what we want to do, and it is has been quite a job getting such a Bill. It has been much promised, but not delivered, and we have been frustrated by that.
	In 2004, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Northcote-Trevelyan report, we published our own Bill. I think that it was the first time in modern parliamentary history that a Select Committee has published its own Bill to show what could be done. That approach has borne fruit, because the Government then produced a draft Bill and have now produced a serious proposal to legislate with the draft Constitutional Renewal Bill.
	There will be reasons to ask the Government to strengthen the Bill in a variety of waysthe hon. Member for Richmond Park helpfully mentioned some of them. I think that our Committee and the Joint Committee on the Constitutional Renewal Bill, which is going to consider the Bill, will say that the Government are on the right lines. Indeed, they are doing the right thing and are on the right lines.
	I shall end with one observation on the process. I have been considering this matter over the years to see why it has taken so long to get to this point. It is easy to attack previous Governments for inertia, but I particularly wanted to explore why the last Conservative Government decided not to legislate, despite the recommendation of the former Treasury and Civil Service Committee that they should. Discussions in that period show that the people inside the Government who were responsible for the matter were anxious, and for good reason. They did not want to disturb the essential constitutional position of the civil service and did not want to legislate in a way that would ossify the service. However, there was also a political consideration. They did not want to start down that path if it meant that the proposal simply became a matter for political dispute. It was thought that if the civil service were brought into the political arena and if agreement could not be reached, that would do more harm than good.
	David Hunt, now Lord Hunt, who was leading for the Conservative Government at the time, said, in evidence to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee on 14 June 1995:
	I would not want to start the process without a clear indication from all sectors of the House that in fact we would not see the civil service become a party political football in terms of the amendments being proposed and put forward.
	That was a very proper worry.
	Having discussed this issue with all kinds of people over the years, and having taken evidence from former senior civil servants and former Cabinet Secretaries, I have found that they all express the same worry: can we legislate on the civil service without it becoming an opportunity to have a political dispute about the civil service? If not, they felt that it would be better not to do anything at all. That is a profound consideration.
	Sometimes, we in this House like to say, between ourselves, that we think that this should be a matter for consensus. However, having watched the protestations of commitment to consensus over the years, I have to report that that breaks down at the first whiff of political opportunity. That is the way our system is; that is how we do it. If we see the opportunity to score a political goal or to make a political point, we take it, even if we are notionally committed to a consensus approach.
	This is a huge test for us. It is unfinished constitutional business. We all know that it needs to be done. We know that we would like to put the civil service into statute and to draw some constitutional lines in the sand. The question is whether we can collectively do that without it becoming a political football.
	The motion today refers, as such things always do, to restoring trust in the political system. Our record on that could make one quite pessimistic. The truth is that, for the past 15 years, we have had an auction on trust and distrust in this country. In a sense, we started it. We quickly realised that making allegations against the Major Government brought huge political dividends. If we look at the figures, we see that it was thenin the 1990sthat trust really started to go down, and it has never recovered since. We piled in making all kinds of allegations about the sleazy character of Conservative politicians; then, after 1997, the Conservatives decided that, in order to equalise the balance, they had to make similar charges against us. The effect has been to pull us all down. The reputation in which we are all held has declined immeasurably during that period. In the short term, such activity might seem like good politics, but I can assure the House that it is really bad for the reputation of public life in this country.
	The challenge for us now is to do something about that, but, as David Hunt said all those years ago, we can succeed only if there is genuine consensus in the House and determination on all sides to create a good, coherent civil service Bill that will last.

Peter Lilley: It is a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) in addressing these matters. He interestingly went back into history and paid tribute to the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. In many ways that might be right, as far as the integrity of the civil service is concerned, but I would advise him to read a forthcoming work on the subject which puts a wholly different complexion on whether those reforms were beneficial for the efficiency of the civil service. It is written by a civil servanta gentleman called Mike Coolicanwho advised me when I was at the then Department of Social Security and, no doubt, my Labour successors in due course. I urge the hon. Gentleman to put that on his reading list.
	I should like to put the hon. Gentleman right on the impression that he might have createdeven though I do not think it was his intention to do sothat there was a degree of politicisation in the selection of permanent secretaries under the Thatcher Administration. That was not my experience. I remember when I first got my foot on the lowest rung of the ladder and became a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister responsible for local governmentindeed, the Minister responsible for the abolition of Ken Livingstone, the Inner London Education Authority and all that sort of thing.
	The Bill to achieve those changes was introduced by the Government, and Mrs. Thatcher was very much in favour of it. It was a key centrepiece of the Government's Administration. The official in charge of it made it absolutely clear to Ministers that he thought that it was a barmy idea, that it was wrong in principle, and that it would be damaging in practice. None the less, it was his job as a civil servant to tell us how to achieve our aims in the least damaging and most effective way. As a result, he caught the attention of Ministers, who found him all the more effective because they knew that, rather than soft-soaping them, he was telling them how a bad Bill could be made less bad. He rapidly became permanent secretary, over the heads of his rivals in the then Department of the Environment. That was how it worked. Mrs. Thatcher liked people who answered back and who told her the truth. I suspect that there might be a difference between that attitude and those that pertain nowadays. There was certainly no party political import at that time.
	I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) on raising this extremely important issue. The integrity of the civil service is a pearl of great price, and anyone who has lived or worked in a country that does not have an impartial civil service will recognise just how valuable it is. The possession of an information service within the civil service, that is dedicated to honesty and integrity, is also of immense importance to the operation of democracy. The accountability of Ministers to Parliament, and of civil servants to Ministers, is central to the working of parliamentary democracy.
	All those things are now under threator have been threatenedunder this new Labour Government. Even the fact that the Government are introducing this legislation is a recognition of the fact that there is grave concern about these issues, and that the Government are trying to respond to that, perhaps in good faith, and trying to reverse those things that have been put under threat over the past 10 years. This is unique to new Labour. Historically, the Labour party and Labour Governments have been respectful of the conventions and traditions that uphold the civil service and the integrity of its management.
	The other night, I was browsing through Roy Hattersley's admirable autobiography, Who Goes Home? in which he refers to his experience ahead of, I think, the 1979 election. He had discovered that the retail prices index figures, which were coming out a day after the election, were going to be very good. He said:
	So I asked the Prime Minister if I could announce, or at least leak, our success
	in getting down inflation
	on the eve of the poll. Jim could not have been more scandalised if I had confessed to doctoring the figures.
	So the attitude of that Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, was full of integrity and respect for the system. Callaghan in turn explained to Hattersley how a junior Minister called Dugdale, as a young Member of Parliament and Minister in the post-war Labour Government, had questioned Sir Stafford Cripps as to whether it was really necessary to announce a proposal to reduce the already inadequate cheese ration by a further 2 oz, just before a general election. Stafford Cripps replied that he was not sure of the questioner's identity, but
	whoever he was, if he allowed political considerations to influence his judgement, he was not fit to be one of Her Majesty's ministers.
	Thus there has been a tradition on both sides of the House to uphold the integrity of the processes of Government, and that is why we have retained an impartial civil service until recently.

Kelvin Hopkins: I thank the right hon. Gentleman, my political neighbour, for giving way. He is describing a situation that I remember from my youth; it could even be described as a golden age. Although things were not perfect then, are there not values and attitudes that were prevalent then which we could re-adopt and reinforce now?

Peter Lilley: I agree very strongly with that. I would like to draw on my own experiencethe best way for me to contributerather than provide mere assertion on that and other issues.
	When I became Secretary of State for Social Security, I was told about all the skeletons in the cupboard. There was one particular skeletonI forget exactly what it was, but it was a difficult piece of information to handleand I was told, Minister, you are going to have to think about how to deal with this. I got up one morning to find that that piece of information was the headline in  The Guardian.
	It so happened that my first meeting was with my chief press officer, Stephen Reardon, the responsible official in the Department. I asked him how that newspaper had acquired that piece of information and he told me, I gave it to them. I will not repeat to the House exactly what I said, but I was intemperatewrongly intemperate, as I should not have been intemperate with a civil servant, but I was for a moment. When I asked him how he had come to do that, he replied that the newspaper had asked him a question to which that information was the answer. It was not confidential information, he told me, and he said: My job, Minister, is not to work for you, but for the public. My job is to tell the truth and to give to the public the information that is theirs by right, which cannot be withheld as confidential.
	When I had calmed down, I began to think that this man was rather valuable. He would stand up and tell the truth to all and sundry, including to me; I found him to be an invaluable civil servant throughout my period in office. If I asked him how a particular announcement would be seen by the media, he would give me an honest and accurate prescription. Within just a few weeks of the appointment of the new Labour Government, he was outhe lost his job; he was sackedbecause they could not put up with that sort of integrity. I think that they damaged themselves, as I believe that it strengthens the Government to have people who can be trusted to tell the truth and provide a reliable conduit of information between Departments and the media.
	Secondly, I want to deal with the importance of officials telling the truth directly to Ministers in confidence, helping them to speak truthfully when they are operating in Parliament and correcting errors if Ministers accidentally make them. From time to time, I am invited to speak at the civil service college at Henley and I talk about what Ministers want from officials. I talk about many things, but towards the end I include the point that when we Ministers make a mistake, it is the job of civil servants to present us with a little note saying, Minister, when you said there was no precedent for x, what you actually meant was that there were seven precedents, which are as follows. It can happen very occasionally; even I might say something in the heat of debate or without proper thought that turned out to be incorrect. In those circumstances, officials should present the Minister with a statement of the mistake and it would become the Minister's job to put the record straight immediately, usually in Committee, or perhaps later to the House.
	When I tell today's civil servants that that was and should be the practice, they look at me aghast and in amazement! They first ask how it would be possible for them to do that when all the time Ministers say things that are not true; and secondly they say that the attitude of the Government and Ministers is not the same any more. It is a very sad and sorry state of affairs when some officials seem to be too cowed to stand up to Ministers. A great many probably retain their robustness, which is essential to proper relations between them and Government Ministers.
	In my experience, it is important to have officials working for us even if they do not necessarily agree with all our policies. I carried out an analysis of where policy had, in my view, gone wrong in its formulation or implementation in the Department of Social Securityneedless to say, before I took over. I looked into the Child Support Agency. Part of the reason why it had gone wrong was that everybody was in favour of it: officials, especially women, were in favour of it for feminist reasons; Ministers were in favour of it because it chimed well with dealing with feckless fathers; and no one on the committee preparing for the Bill was against it. No one said, Hang on a minute; will this work? Is it really so sensible? That is why I think it desirable to have officials who are robust enough to stand up and criticise Ministers or the policies that they are putting forward by suggesting that they should think again while a policy is going through a process of development. Civil servants need self-confidence and belief in their own integrity in order to do that.
	Thirdly, there is the issue of accountability. Officials are accountable to Ministers; Ministers are accountable to Parliament. It is difficult to get the balance right. We cannot expect Ministers to take responsibility for every little thing that happens in their Department. We cannot expect a Minister for Transport to resign whenever there is a car crash, even though it is his job to reduce their number. None the less, when something major happens in the Department, the first implication should be that the Minister is responsible rather than, as happens all too often nowadays, the naming, shaming and blaming of the civil servants.
	When I was Financial Secretary to the Treasury, I was responsible for the Inland Revenue. If it had been responsible for losing all the data of every family in the country, I would at least have tentatively offered my resignation to the Prime Minister or Chancellor. I may have hoped that it would be refused, but I would at least have put forward that resignation.  [Interruption.] I do not pretend to any great personal valour in these matters, but it is important for Ministers to accept that, at the end of the day, they are responsible and cannot escape blame by blaming officials.
	To give the Minister an example, I had to consider resigning on such grounds when I was dealing with the allegation that my predecessors had sanctioned the export of chemical weapons precursors and nuclear weapons precursors to Iraq. The only way to kill that allegation dead was to publish the details of every single export licence relating to Iraq in those categories in the years preceding the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. It took a long time; there were thousands of licences. The officials eventually came back and said, All clear, Minister; not a single example. Only the export of two hunting guns were possibly against the sanctions regime. I then summoned in the members of the press one by one, and said to each of them, Look, there are the 14,000 export licences. You can read them yourself, but I can assure you that you will not find an example of anything out of line.
	After I had seen the last member of the press, and they had all gone away rather disappointed that this fox had been shot, a civil servant came to see me and said, I'm frightfully sorry, but one of the very first documents we looked at did actually contain reference to the export of some chemicals which at the time were not considered to be chemicals weapons precursors, but which were subsequently so designated by the United Nations. I asked, Are you sure that that is the only one? and they said, No; we will go and have a look. They then came back and said, Actually, there are five or six shipments, Minister. I said, Do you realise that although you think this is very amusing, I will have to take responsibility, and I will almost certainly be required to resign?
	As it happened, I wrote an open letter to the Chairman of the Select Committee, and everyone was on holiday, and the Press Association wrote the story up very favourably to me and I got away scot-free. However, Ministers are ultimately responsible for the advice they take, and if they take bad advice on a serious matter on which they have given serious assurances, their heads are on the block.
	Let me finally make some brief observations about the reforms that are needed. In response to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, I referred to the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. They entrenched in the British civil service a belief that generalism, not specialism, is the only way to the top, and in terms of promotion and internal recruitment and recruitment from outside, we need to bring in people with specialist experience. It is my experience in business that someone who knows a lot about repairing motor cars can be made into a good librarian, but someone who knows nothing about anything probably cannot be made into a good manager of anything. So specialist expertise is important. That went out of the civil service with the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. Before then, the Indian civil service had at least required people to learn Indian languages, but as a result of those reforms Haileybury collegeit is nothing to do with the schoolwhere the civil servants were taught was closed down and thereafter they learned Greek and Latin in order to go off and govern India. We have suffered from that ethos ever since.
	More significant, in my experience, was the paucity of people in the civil service with project management experience and skills. That might explain why so many major projects go wrong: to get promotion in the civil service, staff should want to be a policy adviser, not a manager. Normally, staff in the civil service do a job for only a couple of years before moving on to something else, hopefully higher up and away from actually managing anything to advising Ministers. Therefore, very few people in the civil service have had any prolonged experience of managing anything through to completion. I raised that with the head of the civil service, and now there is at least some attempt to provide for the formation of project management skills, but I suspect that it does not go far enough.
	I congratulate my Front-Bench colleagues on introducing this motion, and on focusing on the importance of bringing back to the centre of our debate integrity, truth in information and accountability in terms of Ministers' policies and the actions of their Departments. Driven by the criticisms that have been made of their stewardship for the past 10 years, I hope that the Government will forge ahead and introduce a Bill that will entrench the integrity of the civil service; that should not be necessary, but alas, it is. I also hope that my Front-Bench colleagues will live up to what they are saying now when they are in government after May 2010.

Kelvin Hopkins: I welcome the opportunity to speak in this important debate on a subject that has interested me greatly for a long time, not least because I am privileged to be a member of the Public Administration Committee. That is the most enjoyable, interesting and worthwhile role I have had during my 11 years in this House. I am particularly pleased that the Committee is chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright). He is not merely a competent Chair but a brilliant one; he leads us superbly in the work we do. However, although I congratulate him on his speech, it must be said that we do from time to time have slight differences of view. That is healthy, however, and the civil service should be like that, too.
	First, I apologise for not being present for the speech from the Opposition Front Bencher as I was unavoidably detained. I will not be too critical of the motion, even though I shall, obviously, vote with the Government when we divide. I hope that what I say will reflect some of the Opposition's concernsI certainly think that that will be the case, as I shall be repeating comments I have made in the Committee on more than one occasion.
	It is some 150 years since the Northcote-Trevelyan report, so it is not before time that we are talking about putting some of their thoughts into legislation. I am pleased that the Committee put forward a draft civil service Bill, which was highly regarded by Members of all parties, although the previous Prime Minister and his Government were resistant to implementing it. I very much welcome the fact that our new Prime Minister has brought in a new era, one in which we are looking forward positively to a better future.
	My purpose in speaking in this debate is to say that we are moving in the right direction. I have had a number of private conversations with Ministers, and I have spoken publicly in the Committee, and I want to do what I can to give the Government a small shove to move further in the right direction.
	I should also say that I appreciate the speech of the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley), who is a near constituency neighbour. I agree with almost everything he said. He emphasised that there should be a pervasive sense of honour in government in general, and that people were honourable in the past. We have, perhaps, forgotten that a little. This is not just a game of winning and losing; it is about principles, behaving well and setting examples to the rest of the world.
	Without being too high-flown, I should mention that I was recently interviewed for a television programme for the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and the programme makers wanted to know how to run a civil service. I have not been a civil servant and I do not know much, but I emphasised the points made today about civil servants having integrity, ability and a strong sense of public service to the state, and not being corrupted. They were very worried about how to keep corruption out of newly created Governments, particularly in relatively poor countries where people can be corrupted. I said, You should start from the beginning by saying that the first principle is that the civil service must not be tainted by corruption, and you must have people running your state who are not corrupt, and whose objective is to help their politicians govern well and to serve their people to the best of their ability. We in this country must remind ourselves of that a bit, too, given the events of recent times.
	I welcome the very clear shift of direction under our new Prime Minister and his Ministers, but we have some way to go to squeeze out the remaining toxins particularly of the Blair eraand to some extent the Thatcher era as well. I make no apology for mentioning the previous Prime Minister, who happened to be in the same party as me. I do not care much for labels. Reference was made to new Labour, which no one has ever called me, apart from one of my Conservative opponents. She mistakenly described me as a Blairite one day, which caused a great deal of mirth in my constituency, although no one took the comment seriously and she learned better later on. We had a very civilised campaign, we were good friends and so on, but she realised that I was not new Labour and that the word socialist did apply to me. If a label is to be used, I am happy to have that one applied to me.
	What we saw during the Blair era was what I have described, in a perhaps extreme phrase, as the Leninisation of British politics. The essence of Leninisation was to get absolute central control, to smooth out and destroy all resistance in the regime and to have political checks at every level to ensure that what was decided at the centre was carried out at the base. That was the drift. I am not and have never been a Leninist, but interestingly a number of people of Leninist origins, from Leninist organisationsConservative Members are not so familiar with those, although some Labour Members arewere in the Blair regime. Some of the special advisers and political advisers, and even some Ministers, had such associations, so they understood the process of Leninisation and of control; I believe that Lenin's first slogan was, Secure control of the party. Control was the essence of the approach, and that is what happened.
	The attempt to strip away the opposition went on at every level, and of course it marginalised and pushed to one side the principle that underlies British Government: pluralism. All democratic constitutions must contain checks and balances on power, because power is dangerous. People like it when they get it; they do not want to give it away. They want to have more of it, because it is a bit of a drug. The job of constitutions is to restrain those who like power from having too much of it and, sometimes, to take it away from them, by election or by some other means.
	Most constitutions are set up in a way that restrains power, and they contain checks and balances. The American constitution is a classic example of that: it contains the separation and balance of powers. Other constitutions contain restraints within parties. One of Britain's constitutional features that restrained power was the fact that the parties contained a democratic structure that restrained even their leaders. Even that restraint has been stripped out to a large extent from my party and possibly from the Conservative party, and that was damaging. Having healthy debate within parties and restraints on power within parties are as important as having such things within the state.
	Other forms of government existfor example, federalism. America, as well as other countries, depends on such a system, where there are defined roles for central Government and for other parts of government at a lower levelfor example, a regional system could be used, as could some form of states system, as happens in America. Federalism is a way of dividing power so that not all of it resides in the centre.
	Britain has relied for a very long time on a balance of power between different parts not of our constitution as such, but of our political society. Our system has embodied pluralism and, for a long time, strong local government, strong trade unions, strong independent parties that were quite different from each other and that acted as a check on each other, and the balance of power between the Executive and the legislature. Even the legislature is divided between two Houses, which act as a check on each other. All those checks were built in.
	The problem with the recent regime is that it has tried to eliminate all those constraints and checks, so we are examining ways of strengthening those checks and balances once again. Even within the Executive there were, and I hope that there will be again, strong constraints on power. For example, the Cabinet sometimes acted as a restraining influence on Prime Ministers, but unfortunately that has not been the case in recent times. The papers released after 30 years have told us that back in the days of Jim Callaghan and the 1970s economic crisis, a real debate took place in Cabinet about whether the Government should opt for the International Monetary Fund loan or an alternative economic strategy based on some kind of protectionism. Those on the left wanted the protectionist approach, those on the right wanted the IMF loan and deflation, and there was a balancing group in the middle. A powerful debate went on for some time in Cabinet, but eventually Jim Callaghan got his way because the middle group chose to support the IMF loan people. We ended up with the IMF loan, the social contracts and so on, but a real debate did take place in Cabinet.
	I have heard more recently about a caseI am not talking about under the present Prime Minister, but this certainly applies in respect of the previous oneinvolving a Minister who had recently joined the Cabinet. He had the temerity to make some kind of critical suggestion in Cabinet, and was taken aside afterwards by a fellow member and told, That's not done. I'm afraid we don't do that in the Cabinet.
	In recent years, Cabinet meetings have been very short. Senior civil servants have told our Committee that back in the Wilson era and before, it was typical for 200 papers a year to be delivered to Cabinet by Ministers, or by civil servants through Ministers, in order to discuss policy. The Cabinet meetings would go on for some time while the papers were discussed. I understand that in a particular year during the Blair era just two papers were put to the Cabinet, so something has gone seriously wrong between that earlier time and now. The suggestion is that Cabinet became a cipher and was not the power that it used to be.
	Within our constitution, the civil service was always a rock, although perhaps one did not always agree with it; its independence, impartiality, ability and sense of commitment to the public interest were unquestioned. From time to time, one might disagree with it, but we were certainly aware of it. The idea that civil servants might be corrupt or on the take, or that they might take big jobs in industry later so they might be serving the interests of the companies they were later to work for while they were in government, was unthinkable. There were rules about that, but more important than those were the inner constraints: people had a sense of what was right and what was wrong. It was not the job of a servant of the statea servant of the citizensin the civil service to think about lining their pockets as a result of what they did in government. Some doubtless would have done that, but it was not the view held.
	Such values have perhaps declined, partly as a result of the interface between the civil service and business outside becoming so much more porous. There is a difference in values between serving the public, the state and the citizen as a public servant, and making money. I am not saying that either is not necessary, but they are different. I would emphasise that serving the public is a superior value to making money. I know people, even some within my own family, who say that they do not want to work in the private sector, that it is fine for those who do and who want to make money, but they want to serve society through public service. That is a noble thing to say, to feel and to do. Many people in the civil service do that today. We should not make light of that, play it down or try to control it; we should respect it. Re-establishing that attitude in our civil service would be a very good thing.
	To an extent, I am a golden age-ist and I watched Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister with great interest. Although the civil service is portrayed as a rule unto itself and Ministers as doing what they are told by those clever civil servants, that was a better model than we have now. In the end, Ministers make the decisions, but the civil service is there to ensure that things do not go wrongto speak truth unto power, as the phrase has it. When Ministers have a notion to do something, the civil servants say, Actually, Minister, that will not work, for these reasons. You may want to spend lots of money and cut taxes, but the sums don't add up. You have to have some kind of fiscal balance.
	We have to have civil servants who know what they are talking about because, with great respect to my hon. Friend the Minister, not all Ministers are brilliant, even when it comes to their own portfolios. They have to depend on civil servants [ Interruption. ] The Minister is obviously a star in his own right. The civil service has to be preserved and reinforced, and its values have to be restored, if they have been damaged.
	We have to reconstruct the civil service, if it is not damaged too badly, with the values that the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden mentioned. It should also contain a range of views. If we comb out opposition to a particular ideology or philosophy, it is bad for government. When I was a student, I knew a lecturer who became a civil servant in the Treasury. He told me that at the time of the Callaghan devaluation in 1967, some civil servants believed in retaining the high value of the pound, but some of those in the back office were considering the possibility of devaluation and had prepared for it. So when the decision was made, someone in the back office could say, Here's one I prepared earlier. The policy could thus be implemented. What we do not want is civil servants who all believe in a strong currency and would have no idea how to go about devaluation, or its implications, and so would be at a loss.
	Many Conservative Members probably now regret the rash and mistaken decision to join the exchange rate mechanism in 1990, as it led directly to their defeat in 1997. That decision was supported by many Labour Members, although I was not among them. I was an economist in the trade union movement at the time and I wrote time and again that it was a mistake. I predicted in 1990 that it would fail in just the way that it did. Everyone thought that I was a bit off the wall, but later I got a lot of credit. I was not alone, as some other economists thought the same way. In any event, I understand that Nigel Lawson wanted people who agreed with him in his private office. He did not want people who would say, Sorry, Chancellor, but this idea of pinning our currency to other European currencies will not work, the pound will devalue and it will cause a lot of political trouble. It did go badly wrong, but had Nigel Lawson had people around him who warned of the possible consequences, it might not have been quite the tragedy that it was for the economy, the people and, especially, the Conservative party. We might have had a healthier economy later as well.
	We are moving in the right direction, and I want to reinforce the Government's arm on this issue. We have made some serious mistakes in the past, but we are now overcoming them.

Robert Syms: I enjoyed the contribution from the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) as we went back to Victorian times, heard from Lenin and ended up in the Callaghan era. We do not debate the civil service enough in this Chamber. There are 496,000 civil servants who play an important role. How effective our legislation is may depend on a 21-year-old clerk sitting in a benefits office somewhere in the north of England dealing with people. That is how the intent of Parliament is delivered in terms of service delivery to people.
	The civil service is very important, and my experience of local government as opposed to national is that local government is far better at discussing money, terms and conditions, motivation, promotion and how people actually do things. The civil service, however, almost seems to be in a different pot to us, and the only time we ever see civil servantswho are all fairly goodis when we are serving for hours on a Committee.
	As a country, we can be proud of our civil servants. The benefits of having a system that is not corrupt have been mentioned today. One of my observations on the European Union is the cultural difference between northern Europethe Finns, the Swedes and the Britonsand southern Europe, where the sun shines and people are a little more cavalier. We can be very grateful that we have a system that is honest. If other countries have a problemI am thinking of Russia and Turkey, for exampleit is the corruption in their systems that holds them back.
	We should debate our civil service a lot more. If we have a problem, it is probably that we do not recycle people out of the civil service into other careers. I always look to the French system, in which senior civil servants go to work in a bank or for a major institution. As the Minister pointed out, the third sector also offers good examples of people who go out and get experience in the outside world and then come back and work for the public benefit. I know that there are problems with pensions and rewards when people go in and out of the system, but I do not think it would be beyond our wit in this modern age to work out a system whereby those at the top of the civil service would not only be experienced civil servants but would have a much more direct experience of the outside world, on which they so often give advice. That would be an important reform.
	I broadly welcome what the Government are doing through legislation. The problem is that we have moved over recent years to a more presidential system as Downing street becomes ever more important. In the years of my youth, Governments changed fairly regularly. In a way, that helped balance within the system. We had Wilson for six years, Heath for just under four, and then the Labour party under Wilson and Callaghan for five years. The Thatcher Government served a record-breaking 18 years and this Government will, I suspect, certainly manage 13 years. Whether they will get beyond that point remains to be seen. It changes the nature and character of the system, because people suddenly realise that the person at the top, who is the one person who can break through for decision making in Whitehall, is very important for posts and patronage. That has an impact on the way government operates.
	It is important not only that we legislate through a civil service Bill but that Parliament should move to secure more influence over the way Governments conduct their business. Suspicions about the Governmentnot only because of the activities of the previous Prime Minister, when Orders in Council were moved to give Alastair Campbell control over press officers, but because of the way business in this House is guillotined so that we often cannot fully discuss Bills and many other matterslead us to wonder what happens behind the closed doors of Ministries. There is a concern out there.
	The Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), mentioned trust. If we keep impugning each others' motives in politics, it is no wonder that the great British public start questioning our motives on issues from expenses to everything else. That downgrades the political process, so we have to be extremely careful. Trust is a commodity. Part of the Government's problem is that if one promises a referendum and does not deliver on it, people might impugn their motives on other issues. Trust is very important in terms of what the Government do.
	The public see a Government who are spending an awful lot on advertising. No doubt, as the Minister says, some very worthy things are advertised, such as road safety, but there is a question mark over whether there is a political objective for all these thingsbut perhaps that is because of sceptical times in which we live.
	We have heard that there are 70 advisers. I do not have too much of a problem with advisers, and if we look at most other systemsparticularly the American onewe see that we have very few advisers compared with most Governments. They play an important role that allows civil servants to be totally neutral. A lot of the political advisory roles allow links with party political organisations and so on. It depends on their role and whether it involves developing policy or spinning.
	Our concern in the Conservative party, after the history of the past few years, is that rather too many people deal with the media and rather too few deal with blue-skies thinking, policy issues and those important matters to do with delivering a particular governmental agenda. The special adviser budget has gone up from just under 2 million to at least 6 million. The number of press officers in some Departments has gone up tremendously, too.
	I have the privilege of serving on the Health Committee. I note that the number of press officers in the Department of Health has gone up from 15 to 26. Why are so many needed? Occasionally, nasty bugs come along and kill people, so somebody might be needed to put out information then, but the Government have been lauding the amount spent on the NHS and one wonders whether increasing the number of press officers is necessarily the best use of resources.
	I believe that the US and some other Parliaments have better systems than ours. I am not concerned about the number of advisers, but there should be parliamentary scrutiny of who they are, what their role is and whether they are qualified to fulfil it. Parliament should assert itself so that it can see who is being appointed to the various Ministries. There ought to be much more scrutiny by the House.
	The change of Prime Minister gives us an opportunity to revisit some of those matters. The Government have made a number of announcements, and I hope that they continue in the direction that they are going. Given the history, we are a little sceptical. A very important point was made earlier about the need for the parties to find some common ground: any civil service Bill must have the broadest possible support, as its provisions must be sustained and retained for many years ahead.

Julian Lewis: Because I was elected on 1 May 1997, which could be described as the mirror image for the Conservative party of the significance of 1 May 2008 for the Government, my experience of direct dealings with civil servants is limited to two periods in my life: first, when I was an academic researcher delving into the civil service archives for the period covering the end of the second world war and the start of the cold war; and secondly, when I was deputy director of the Conservative research department. Happily, my duties included shining a spotlight on Leninists in the Labour party, helpfully acknowledged in the entertaining speech by the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins).
	From the first experience, I concluded that the civil service has, in fact, always been highly politicalbut not party political. That is one of the two themes that I wish to develop. From the latter experience, I can throw some light on the questions asked by my exuberant hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) about where special advisers come from, and, indeed, where they goor at least, what happened in the closing years of the Thatcher Administration. We are discussing the perpetual problem of the balance between professional expertise and mandated political leadership. Many years ago, long before Yes Minister made the notion of Ministers having to be house-trained by their civil servants almost a byword of popular humour, I remember reading an essay by the late Tony Crosland, in which he spelt out the reasons why Minister were often ineffective in government, or at least, why their policies differed so little from those of their predecessors. He explained that even the most intelligent Minister, on taking up a new position, could probably expect to take a year to 18 months before gaining command of their brief. Within another year or 18 months, they might be moved on to another job.
	The problem that Ministers faced, of not having sufficient expertise, has in large measure been addressed by the appointment of special advisers, and I am going to sing their praises in a moment or two. First, however, I want to refer to the period in which I delved into the archives for the period 1942 to 1947, during which Government Departments were trying to work out what the British empireas it still just about was at that stagewould have to defend itself against when the second world war was over.
	Huge arguments erupted between the Foreign Office, which believed that the Anglo-Soviet alliance of 1941 onwardsthe treaty was signed in 1942should be the cornerstone of our post-war foreign policy, and the chiefs of staff and their advisers, who believed that the Soviet Union would probably be the greatest potential military threat facing this country. What struck me at the time was that an argument was raging, effectively, between two Departments of civil servants, and how little the Ministers, let alone the Prime Minister, were involved in the process.
	The debate was highly political, but it was not party political. It therefore occurred to me that perhaps the real power in the land lay more with the professional civil servant and the professional expert, rather than with the political leader. I do not think anyone under any Government would dispute that a good civil servant is one with strong opinions about the political issues of the day, who will argue those opinions on their merits, provided that they do not allow themselves unduly to be swayed by party political considerations.
	The reverse of that coin is that if a Minister comes into office without a high degree of preliminary expertise, he or she will be somewhat adrift, because at the point at which the Minister wishes to take party political considerations into account, the civil servant, if he or she is doing the job properly, will rightly turn round to the Minister and say, I really can't advise you on that, Minister. I am not party political and this is a party political matter.
	When I was working in the Conservative research department, I used to see a career progression, almost. We would have our individual desk officers, as we still do today, shadowing each Department of state. The young people working at those desks would develop considerable expertise. When they had done that for a few years, and because we were in government, they would be able to apply for, and more often than not get, jobs as special advisers. As I said in an earlier intervention, it was felt quite adequate to have two special advisers in most Departments, one sitting more or less at the right hand of the Secretary of State, and the other being available to the middle-ranking and junior Ministers.
	I thought that that was a thoroughly good thing, because it meant that the Minister had someone to whom he or she could turn for advice when party political matters were relevant, and it was a way in which the political party to which the Minister belonged could have a direct channel to the Minister, without being bogged down or prevented from reaching the Minister by the serried ranks of party politically neutral civil servants in between. I thought that that was a good system, and I believe to this day that it is a good system, but we do not require many people to fulfil that role.
	On the contrary, the fact that there was just one special adviser for each Cabinet Minister and one more for the rest was a very good thing, because it meant that there was no dithering about who to consult, there was a direct channel of communication, and the Minister had someone on whom to rely to consider the political implicationssomeone whose time was not taken up with numerous other duties such as an elected politician inevitably must perform, and someone who was party political and also an expert in the field. Such special advisers went on, in many cases, to become Conservative MPs, including the present Leader of the Oppositionand a jolly good thing too.
	But there is a different sort of special adviser out there today. That sort of special adviser is not a confidant for a Minister, not a channel of communication for the party, and certainly not someone doing blue-skies thinkingor perhaps red-dawn thinking for the present Government. It is someone whose job it is to go out there and distort the news, or at least massage the news, for the benefit of relationships with reporters. When my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) winds up, I will be interested to hear how he reacts to this suggestion: that when a Conservative Government next come to power, party political appointees should only be special advisers and no longer be press officers. They would do precisely what their name implies: give special advice, not spin.

Greg Clark: The right hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but he should be careful; he himself has experience of withholding information. He and I have been corresponding about whether, would you believe, it is reasonable for me to have sight of the Cabinet Office's staff magazine. That seems a fairly innocuous proposition: it might be useful for a team shadowing the Cabinet Office to know what is going on there, given the hopeful prospect that we might inherit it in due course. Imagine my astonishment when the Minister answered my parliamentary question by saying that it was not in the public interest for me to be given access to that magazine. I was generous to him and assumed that this was a mistake, so I wrote him a friendly note saying:
	I am at a loss to understand why you won't let Members of Parliament see copies of the Cabinet Office staff magazine...Would you mind reconsidering?
	But just in case he did not, I said:
	or alternatively, treat this as a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
	I fully expected to get a copy of the magazine through the post, but amazingly the Minister instructed his officials to go through the bureaucracy of denying permission for that. I have a two-page letter from the freedom of information team within the Cabinet Office saying that it will take not just the standard 20 working days but
	an additional 20 days to take a decision on where the balance of public interest lies
	in Members of Parliament seeing the Cabinet Office staff magazine. That from a Minister who only last week told the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase that when it came to freedom of information,
	I agree with Gus
	the Cabinet Secretary
	that there is a big culture change that FOI brings. I think that overall it is a positive culture change for government.
	I am afraid that the culture change seems yet to affect the right hon. Gentleman.
	There are important questions, and they are not motivated purely by political partisanship, as the Minister suggested in his reaction to the speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude). In particular, the Government, having set out a course of freedom of information and greater impartiality through the White Paper, are failing to live up to the standards that apply in that document. For example, there is the question of waste. All of us, every day, receive mailbags full of ever-more-glossy, ever-more-expensively produced publications, often from quangos, all with advertising and public relations budgets. I am not saying that all money spent on advertising and public relations is wasted, but there is a question of accountability. How are we to know that the vast sums of money being spent, especially by non-statutory bodies, are being spent in people's best interests? Why, for example, has the Civil Aviation Authority paid in the past five years nearly 500,000 to one single PR company and 700,000 to another? Why has the Meat and Livestock Commission paid out 750,000 to a PR company? The East of England Development Agency has paid one single PR company 500,000. Many businesses instruct PR firms to influence Ministers, but Ministers are instructing PR firms to do their job of communicating with the electorate.
	When it comes to incompetence, where to start? This is a Government who take more and more information from citizens and then proceed to lose it. The personal details of 25 million citizens were lost by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs when Ministers, including those present, knew that there was a systemic problem across government because it was reported to them in the July before the incident was reported. One of my constituents brought to my attention the fact that the online delivery team within the Legal Services Commission in the Ministry of Justice had won the 2007 civil service award for technology. The very next day after the prize was awarded, my constituent received an e-mail saying:
	we are aware that a number of providers have had difficulties being able to sign into the new LSC online and as a result of this we have made the decision to close LSC online from Monday 19 November until further notice.
	Why did one of my constituents receive a letter confirming an urgent gynaecological appointment? He was rather baffled by that, as he is a 65-year-old man. That just shows the degree of chaos and confusion in the way that information is held in the Department of Health. It is important that Ministers are held to account for the incompetent handling of the administration of government.
	We heard some excellent speeches by right hon. and hon. Members. The Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, who serves with great distinction, made a marvellous speech, with a sweep of history worthy of Melvyn Bragg's programme, In Our Time, looking back to the origins of the current civil service settlement. The commendation of the 22 pages of the Northcote-Trevelyan report is a lesson to the Government and to the prospective Government as to the benefits of economy as regards Government publications.
	The hon. Gentleman said that in the previous Conservative Government, the question, Is he one of us? would be asked. I can envisage the same question being asked by the current Prime Minister. Indeed, I know from some of my friends and colleagues who have served in the Government in various Departments with which the Prime Minister has been associated that it is almost exactly one that passes his lips. If not expressed in quite such clear terms, it is certainly an assessment that is made. The hon. Gentleman is to be commended for the fact that we have the prospect of a civil service Bill, and I congratulate the Government on making that progress. It is very much down to the work of the hon. Gentleman's Committee, supported by the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins), and other Committee members over the years. The prospect of that Bill is a great step forward, and it is important that we proceed to scrutinise the legislation on a cross-party basis. There is a precedent for that: the Charities Bill proceeded for the most part without political contention getting in the way of proper scrutiny or the achievement of a consensus as to what should be a charity, and on how charities should be regulated. I hope that it will be possible to make similar progress on the civil service Bill.
	The contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) reminds us of his distinguished career. He quoted with alarm what he regarded as a departure from the high standards that he enjoyed as Secretary of State. When his officials made a mistake on his behalf and caused him to say things that were inaccurate, he said that he was temperate in his response. I have only ever seen my right hon. Friend in temperate mode; I cannot imagine the hinted fury that he pointed to. He made an important point about getting specialist skills into the civil service. It is important that there is such a contribution. I cannot understand why it is still relatively unusual for people to move backwards and forwards between the public sector, the third sector and government. We should address the question of why people should not regard themselves as doing particular jobs, and of why those sectors are in silos so that it is relatively unusual and remarkable when people move between them.
	The hon. Member for Luton, North made a reasonable contribution. It was not reasonable in terms of its quality because its analysis of some of the drivers of centralisation was quite brilliant. He is right to say that we should avoid making the matter too personal and that we should not ascribe malign motives, but there was a plan. One of the great differences between the parties is that the Government had a deliberate plan to exercise central control over Governmentperhaps for the best of intentions. Perhaps it was the case that Ministers thought that by defining a template for how things should be run and making sure that it was implemented without any movement away from it, they could achieve high standards. We were always sceptical of that approach. The hon. Gentleman described it as Leninist, and it involved controlling the related information as well as the plans. We were sceptical of that approach, and we can now see that it has not worked and that we should move away from it. The hon. Gentleman's insight into that process was extremely valuable.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) talked about the longevity of Governments, and he made the point that we should not impugn each other's motivations because it does decrease the standard of respect for all politicians. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) made a passionate contribution. I know that he is a committed member of the Select Committee, and he will be engaged in the scrutiny of the Bill, ensuring that we take a close interest in the passage of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) pointed out in his contribution some of the history of the use of special advisers. He made a point, on which we should reflect, about whether it would be useful discipline to restrict special advisers solely to comments on matters of policy rather than allowing them to brief the press.

Greg Clark: My hon. Friend is right to pay tribute to the wider spread of civil servants. They include people who work in local government, and, as constituency Members of Parliament, we all know that they do tremendous work in dealing with some of our constituents' problems.
	We have debated the Government's management of the civil service. As the Minister for the Cabinet Office said, one of the ways in which the Government try to manage the civil service is through capability reviews, which they impose on all Whitehall Departments. One naturally assumed that the Cabinet Office, which is responsible for those reviews, should lead by example, especially when 10 Downing street is, and I quote
	a management unit of the Cabinet Office.
	Being the Minister responsible for assessing the Prime Minister's capability must be terrifying. I therefore read the assessment with interest.
	When the questions verge on the impertinent, they go to the heart of the problems at No. 10. The first question may have given hope to the Minister for the Cabinet Office's brotherand perhaps even to him. The question asked:
	Do you
	10 Downing street
	have a leadership development/promotion process that is fair and transparent?
	The second question asked:
	How do you manage the performance of everyoneby rewarding good performance and tackling poor performance?
	Mr. Deputy Speaker, I suspect that you share my dismay but not my surprise to learn that 10 Downing street falls down in the effectiveness of the processes to ensure that it benefits from competent leadership and roots out poor performance. The inspectors of the capability reviews concluded that that was an urgent development area for No. 10.
	According to the inspectors, on the leadership of 10 Downing street, there are
	significant weaknesses in capability for future delivery that require urgent action.
	Sadly, it appears that 10 Downing street,
	is not well placed to tackle these weaknesses and needs significant additional action.
	The inspectors' conclusion is bleak. No. 10
	is not well placed to deliver improvement in the medium term.
	The inspectors, who report to the Minister for the Cabinet Office, have reached the same conclusion as the electors of this country are reaching. The Government have trebled spending on spin and PR but cannot communicate a vision for the future. They have intruded into people's lives far more than any British Government in history, yet display flagrant disregard for the security of the information that has been entrusted to them.
	The Government do not only lose confidential data from millions of people, and have not only lost all credibility for their promise to cut waste or end the culture of spin, but have lost their way, lost the trust of their core supporters, lost the control of their local government heartlands and lost the London mayoralty. They are led by a Prime Minister who has increasingly lost the plotall that is left for them to do is lose the general election.

Phil Hope: I have listened with great interest to the important points made during this afternoon's debate. Unfortunately, it began extraordinarily badly with a contribution from the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) that was irrelevant in content, tawdry in style and persuaded no Conservative Back Benchers, let alone us, to vote for the motion. It ended with the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) talking about spin and waste, which describes his badly used 17 minutes.
	I begin by doing what I hope that all hon. Members would supportpaying tribute to the professionalism and dedication of our civil service. I want to place on record my gratitude and admiration for the hugely diverse range of activities that civil servants throughout the country undertake, day in, day out, with great professionalism and commitment.
	The United Kingdom civil service is deservedly internationally renowned for its high standards. As my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office said, the key is to ensure that we maintain and build on those standards as the service evolves to meet the challenges ahead.
	Several speakers have taken us on a history tour, beginning with establishing the basis for our civil service more than 150 years ago in the Northcote-Trevelyan report. It was good to see my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) on such good form this afternoon. He made a thoughtful and serious contribution, which asked the core question about the relationship between the civil service and the politicians who are elected to govern the country. He discussed the dilemmas that that creates and how we move forward. Many members of the Public Administration Committee, which my hon. Friend chairs, spoke about a draft civil service Bill. The principles set out in the Northcote-Trevelyan reporta politically impartial permanent civil service, recruited on the basis of merit through fair and open competitionendure and continue to underpin the service as we know it today. They still form the bedrock of the civil service, even in a profoundly different environment from that in which they were first written. Let me assure the House that the Government are fully committed to maintaining and upholding those principles for the civil service of the future.
	Indeed, our actions speak louder than our words in that regard. The provisions of draft Constitutional Renewal Bill, which Opposition Members seem to have forgotten was published on 25 March, place the core values of the civil serviceintegrity, honesty, impartiality and objectivityin statute. My hon. Friend said that we should not make the provisions over-elaborate, but ensure that the civil service is ruled through Parliament, not through the royal prerogative, and that we do the right thing on the right lines. That is exactly what we are doing. The Bill will be taken through a process of pre-legislative scrutiny involving a Joint Committee of both Houses over the next few months. The Bill also provides for a statutory civil service commission tasked with upholding the key principle of recruitment to the civil service on merit, through fair and open competition. The new commission will be established as an Executive non-departmental public body, which will underline its independence as a guardian of that fundamental principle.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) used the word honour in talking about people who work for the civil service. That word is not in the Billthe other words that I mentioned arebut I certainly understand and recognise the spirit that he described. I did not recognise his analysis of the Leninisation that he described, but if there has been a revolution since 1997, it has been in our ability to create full employment and in lifting 600,000 children and 1 million pensioners out of poverty. That is the kind of revolution that this country has been pleased to see over the past 10 years.
	The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) asked a couple of questions about pre-appointment hearings. Let me remind the House that we are introducing pre-appointment hearings to enable Select Committees to take evidence from candidates for key posts. The final decision will remain with the appointing Minister, but they will take into consideration the Committee's views before deciding whether to proceed with an appointment.
	The hon. Lady asked why the civil service commissioners will not be appointed by Parliament. Under our proposals for increased parliamentary scrutiny of public appointments, the first civil service commissioner will be put forward for pre-appointment scrutiny by the relevant Select Committee. She also asked whether senior appointments to non-departmental public bodies, or quangos, should be subject to pre-appointment scrutiny by Parliament. I am glad to tell her that we agree with her. We are committed to increasing democratic scrutiny of a range of senior appointments to the boards of non-departmental public bodies. We are currently working with the Liaison Committee to agree a final list of posts that will be suitable for such pre-appointment hearings, which we hope to publish shortly.
	The draft Constitutional Renewal Bill contains a number of other reforms, which will underpin and uphold the impartiality of the civil service. The Bill makes provision for a code of conduct for civil servants and a code of conduct for special advisers, and for copies of those codes to be laid before Parliament. The Bill also makes provision for a report on special adviser numbers and costs, and for the report to be laid before Parliament. We have heard a lot of talk about special advisers, mainly from the Opposition, but I want to remind hon. Members that in his evidence to the Public Administration Committee on civil service legislation only last week, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, was clear that, with the numbers that we have currently74 special advisers from a total of 500,000 civil servicepoliticisation is
	is not a problem at all. Indeed, good quality special advisers around the system, two per minister in general, work well.
	Special advisers protect the civil service and prevent politicisation, because they do the things that Ministers want to have done, but which would be inappropriate for permanent civil servants to do.

Phil Hope: I was just coming to the hon. Gentleman, who revealed his ambition to be a special adviser.  [ Interruption. ] Yes, I could offer him a job, as my right hon. Friend the Minister suggests, but I do not think that the kind of advice that he would give us would be that helpful. The hon. Gentleman said that even if he cannot become a special adviser, he would like to meet one. All that he needs to do is have a word with his leader. The hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) reminded the House that the Leader of the Opposition used to be a special adviser. Perhaps the Leader of the Opposition would like to remind the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) of the shadowy role that he played as a special adviser to Norman Lamont, when the Tory debacle of crashing out of the exchange rate mechanism happened in the 1990s. The Opposition have conveniently forgotten that, but believe you me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, we have not.
	The hon. Gentleman also asked what happens to special advisers when they leave the civil service. He will be pleased to know that the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers says:
	All civil servants, including special advisers, are subject to the Rules on the acceptance of outside appointments by Crown servants...for the first two years after leaving office. They are required, in the circumstances set out in the rules, to obtain prior approval to accept an outside appointment.
	I hope that that answers his question.
	Hon. Members made several points about Government communications. The right hon. Member for Horsham repeated allegations about some kind of impropriety by the Government when they made announcements about neighbourhood policing. I suggest that he should get himself on to the circulation lists of the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), both of whom have received letters from the permanent secretary that make it clear why the allegations that the right hon. Member for Horsham has seen fit to repeat today are wrong. Such mudslinging will not work, even though he continues to repeat those allegations.
	Government spending on advertising has increased since 1997, and we are pleased that it has. It has increased from 69 million in 1996-97 to 154 million in 2006-07. I am pleased to announce those figures because we are saving lives as a result of that Government advertising and marketing. We are on course to meet the 10-year casualty reduction target by 2010, which will mean that there has been a 40 per cent. reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured.
	The hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) complained about the increase in press officers in the Department of Health. Successful advertising and marketing by the Department is helping to achieve a number of important health targets on smoking. The target to reduce the prevalence of smoking among the general population to 21 per cent. by 2010 is a key and essential part of achieving a healthier society.
	The civil service and its world has changed dramatically since 1854. That is why important reforms are now taking place, such as the transformation of the Pension Service. Service customers already benefit from a better service that has been designed around their needs. The Department for Work and Pensions pays more than 98 per cent. of its customers by direct payment. That is not only more convenient, but is saving about 1 billion a year between 2005 and 2010.
	There have been reductions in the number of civil servants, and more of them have been relocated outside London and the south-east. We are investing heavily in a skills programme for the development of the civil service, and we have a capability review programme that is driving forward the process of change within the civil service.
	It is unfortunate that the Conservative party have used this debate not to celebrate the success of the civil service and the challenges ahead, but to make cheap and inaccurate party political points. I am glad that Madam Deputy Speaker intervened on the right hon. Member for Horsham, quite rightly, as he drifted well away from his brief.
	We are committed to legislating for the civil service and to safeguarding its impartiality. We have published measures as part of our draft Constitutional Renewal Bill, and we welcome hon. Members' views on that. We are committed to keeping public expenditure under control while ensuring that civil servants have the skills and tools that they need to deliver better services with less. We will continue to undertake a programme of investment and renewal to ensure that Government Departments are in the best possible shape to meet the challenges and demands of the next 150 years.

Ian Gibson: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Third time.
	Before I begin, I want to pay a compliment to the Members who have turned up to discuss the issue this afternoonparticularly my colleagues from Norfolk who have been in the forefront during discussions on the issue, and members of the Select Committee that met to make the Bill much tighter and sharper than it was on Second Reading. I pay an individual compliment to the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), who sadly missed Second Reading owing to tragic circumstances. It is grand to see him in the Chamber today, and I hope that he will have the opportunity to extend his interest in the Bill.
	The prime purpose of the Bill is public safety on the waterways of the broads, not only for people from Norfolk and Suffolk who use the broads but for people from across the world, the UK and Europe. The broads are a popular tourist resort, with many boats dodging about during the summer. We are rather concerned about public safety on the waterways. There has been agreement between the Broads Authority and three national boating organisations on the Bill's provisions. I shall say more about that later.
	Two specific issues arose from the Select Committee on the Bill, which was chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor). I thank him for the efforts that were put in. The authority has incorporated as much as possible from the legal agreements with the boating organisations in the Bill. If people have looked at the Bill, they will have seen how it has changed since Second Reading.
	Following the Committee's comments on direct elections, I am told that the Broads Authority will consider the principle in its meeting on Friday, after we have heard what the Minister has to say this afternoon. The authority believes that direct elections are a matter for the Government and are not appropriate for the Bill.

Norman Lamb: I should be grateful if the hon. Gentleman would use this opportunity to give his view on direct elections. It was extremely helpful to hear the comments of the Chairman of the Committee, but does the hon. Gentleman support the principle, too?

Ian Gibson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that question. The matter has been resolved in Scotland, so it seems to me that there are lessons to be learned there. He and I have had discussions with the Broads Authority, and I believe that the door was beginning to open on this issue. We both said in public, and to the local newspaper, that it would be a good idea to try to find ways forward, as direct elections would allow the many people who want to play a part in the broads to go through an electoral process. There is a public mood for that to happen, and I think it should be encouraged. I hope that the Broads Authority will respond positively on Friday, and that the Minister will give the proposal all the backing that he can.
	Some of the issues that arose on Second Reading have been handled in the appropriate way, through open debate. I think that there is much more to come, but I repeat that the House must understand that no provision for direct elections can be put on the face of the Bill. The Bill has implications for other areas of the country, and new legislation may be needed if we want direct elections in other places. If that is the decision of the individuals concerned, I shall give it my support.
	Of course, promoting a private Bill was not chosen lightly as a course of action. After many years of discussion with Government officials, it became clear that that was the only route open to the authority if various important matters of safety were to be addressed. With many of the proposals, the authority is following a path already paved by British Waterways and the Environment Agency, and it acknowledges the help and advice that those organisations have given.
	It is worth putting it on the record that the authority is also grateful to successive Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Alun Michael) and my hon. Friends the Members for Brent, North (Barry Gardiner) and for South Dorset (Jim Knight)the latter is now Minister for Schools and Learnersand the present Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw).
	The Bill includes a number of general provisions designed to improve safety on the broads' waterways, and to ensure that they are managed effectively in the interests of all users. The need for additional powers has been highlighted by the requirements of the port marine safety code and by specific incidents. The principle underlying them was accepted on Second Reading and in Committee, and I do not intend to repeat the argument here.
	The agreements with the national boating organisations have also raised some issues. For the past two years the Broads Authority has been working hard with the Royal Yachting Association, the British Marine Federation and the Inland Waterways Association to develop and refine the Bill. It has reached agreements with them over the Bill's provisions, and they can be seen in schedule 1.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire mentioned two specific issues arising from the Committee stage. Evidence and arguments from the Broads Authority were considered in July 2007, and four petitioners and their agents were heard at that sitting. The Committee also received a report from the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. A full discussion of the relevant issues was held, and the Committee concluded that the Bill should be allowed to proceed, with some amendments. The Broads Authority put forward a number of amendments to deal with concerns raised during the consultation process, while other amendments were designed to meet recommendations from the Secretary of State that included questions about how membership of the Broads Authority came about.
	The status of the legal agreements was raised on Second Reading. As is often the case with private Bills, the Broads Authority entered into agreements with interested parties about the operation of certain provision in the Bill. Following concerns expressed by the Committee, the authority and the national boating bodies gave further consideration to those agreements, with a view to incorporating certain of their provisions in the Bill. In that regard, I invite hon. Members to look at schedule 1, where they will see that words such as independent, scrutiny and so on have been added.
	A number of the provisions in the agreements were already covered in the Bill, either specifically or in general terms. It has been agreed that most of the remainder should be included in the Bill, and the amendments made at consideration stage secure that.
	I believe that parish council representation should be included in the direct elections, and parish councillors have lobbied all the Norfolk MPs for that. Parish councils have a serious interest in the broads, and given the important work that their members do, they would like to participate in some way if there are to be direct elections.
	The authority has 21 members, to take account of the national and local interests and to reflect its duties and responsibilities. Ten are appointed by the Secretary of State, nine by the eight local authorities in the area, and two by the authority from its statutory navigation committee. The local authority members are councillors, who have been elected locally; that is an important link with the local community, but that is not to say that the link could not be furthered and improved. The Bill includes no proposals to change overall membership, but as I pointed out, there may be additions to, or adaptations of, that membership.
	Hon. Members will probably recall that the issue of direct elections and parish council representation on the Broads Authority was raised on Second Reading. The report of the Committee on the Broads Authority Bill stated that
	the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000 set out in its framework for the constitution of a National Park that a minimum of 20 per cent of members of the National Park Authority were to be elected in a poll by those on the local government electoral register within the Park area. A similar model should be considered for the Broads Authority.
	As the Authority has sought to extend its powers, we believe that the Government should now consider the constitution of the Authority.
	We will hear about that shortly. The report continued:
	We are not minded to amend the Bill to include such provisions.

Ian Gibson: As I said, parish councillors are very important, and they should be part of the equation that is considered by the Broads Authority. There are questions to do with parish councils, including whether they cover the whole area of the broads and how much of the broads is in each parish. That is not perhaps as important as having people on the authority who are devoted, enthusiastic, keen, determined, knowledgeable and interested in spending many hours helping to develop the broads.
	Before someone asks me whether the broads will be flooded by some agency or other, let me add that I think that the broads will be there for at least 50 years. That commitment was made in a debate yesterday. The broads will not be salinated or deliberately flooded. Of course, we have no idea what climate change will do to them; we cannot greatly control that, but we will make attempts to do so.
	We have to think about how we will organise the waterways in the next 50 years. We do not believe that the place to do that is in the Bill. We had discussions on the issue, but the advice that we were given was that some other formal regulatory pathway would have to be used to put that into the equation. That is not an excuse to do nothing; I believe that the sincere intention is to try to use a mechanism, as soon as possible, to ensure that that happens in the broads and in other areas, with the Norfolk broads blazing a trail. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is well placed to consider those issues with the Broads Authority, and to bring forward the necessary legislation.
	It falls to DEFRA to consider the issue of direct elections and the related matter of parish council representation on the authority. The authority will be considering the principle on Friday. The members will want to take into account the views of the House and, in particular, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I mentioned the chairmanship of themy hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire; we agree with the Committee that the Bill is not the place in which to seek to make changes to the membership of the authority, but that is certainly an issue to be considered.
	I hope that the Bill will successfully complete Third Reading and move on to the other place. Its proposals affect the rights of navigation and would improve safety on the broads, to the benefit of all those who use the waterways. The objective of public safety is a legitimate ground for qualifying what might otherwise be an unhindered public right. Consider, for example, the measures that Parliament introduced for the protection of motorists. It made the wearing of seat belts compulsoryit was predicted that that would be a failure, but it has been an amazing successand it gave local authorities the ability to regulate the way in which roads are used. So there are parallels setting out how to make effective changes and improve the safety of people who use facilities. Many of the provisions in the Bill are well precedented elsewhere.
	The authority believes that it has the correct balance, and the Bill incorporates the necessary measure of protection for the private individual. Of course, there will be individuals who do not agree, but in general many people seem to think that the measure should be in place. Like the seat belt regulations, I think that the measure will become part and parcel of people's way of life; it will be part of the way in which they use the broads.
	Before the Bill was deposited, the authority spent a year on preparatory work, and on consultation and discussion with DEFRA, national and local boating organisations and other key stakeholders. Discussions with national boating bodies have continued, and resulted in many of the changes that have been made as the Bill has progressed. If we are honest, we know from experience that things evolve and change: the spirit is there, as long as public safety is foremost in those equations and considerations.
	There was widespread consultation, and changes were made by the authority to meet the concerns that were raised. No petitions were received from any organisation in the House but, importantly, there were four private petitioners. All the issues pursued by boating organisations have been addressed. The authority has secured agreement with the main boating organisations on the Bill's provisions. It is important to introduce the Billthe summer is a-coming, and boats will be scurrying around the broadsand we should push the legislation through, although I expect that it will be held up in another place.

Ian Gibson: Yes, I am 100 per cent. for trust, confidence-building and making sure that there is firm representation so that if people have a grudge or gripe, they can go to the Broads Authority with their complaint and have it taken seriously so that something can be done about it. The spirit of the Bill, and the way in which it has been talked up and discussed, will allow that to happen. When it was introduced, such measures might not have been quite as up front as they are now, but I hope that if we get the Bill through, and if it completes its passage through the other place in the next few months, we will have a new spirit on the broads, and people will be able to enjoy that lively part of the world. It is in everyone's interests to make sure that we agree to Third Reading today.

Norman Lamb: I entirely agree, and I have no criticism of the work of the Committee.
	I shall deal with the issue of direct elections, but first I want to go through some of the continuing concerns. I should be grateful if, in his contribution, the Minister could respond to some of the issues. He may want to follow that up with a letter, to amplify those points. I shall repeat as accurately as I can the concerns that have been expressed to me.
	On the boat safety scheme, the argument that is put to me is that byelaws are already in place and the Bill is not needed. Byelaws may be slower to implement, it is suggested, but they force the unelected and otherwise unaccountable Broads Authority to enter into public consultation. That is the perspective of the people who have raised their concerns with me. On insurance, they say that compulsory insurance does not need to be introduced via a private Bill. Procedures for submission of current insurance at the time of vessel registration should be sufficient.
	General and special directions are a topic that has engendered a considerable amount of debate. It revolves around the extent to which traditional freedoms are constrained by regulation and executive power. It is argued that the directions in the Bill are onerous and costly to implement. It is likely that the authority will fund the entire additional expenditure from the navigation account or toll income, thus further reducing the amount available for waterways maintenance, particularly of those parts of the system in need of dredging.
	Built into the constitution of the Broads Authority are three pillarsthe three duties of the authority to protect navigational interests, to pursue conservation and to promote tourism. There is inevitably friction between those three interests, and it is self-evidently the job of the authority to manage those tensions and to seek to ensure that they are given proper balance, but it is almost built into the structure of the organisation that there will be suspicions and battles to fight over those competing interests. The particular concern is that if it costs more money, navigation may lose out as a result.

Richard Bacon: The hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) has covered these matters in exhaustive, not to say exhausting, detail, so I shall try to be brief. I placed a blocking motion on the Order Paper because, like him, I thought that these issues should be aired. Matters that are important to our constituents should not simply go through the House on the nod.
	I feel at best lukewarm about the Bill, partly because of the local government review, which has been mentioned. If restructuring is being considered, which it isI hope that that does not happen, and I do not believe that it is inevitablethere is a strong argument that we should just wait to see what happens and incorporate the Bill into that. The authority's composition is obviously going to change at some point, and Parliament will need to return to this issue either through that local government legislation or through other means, such as a specific piece of extra legislation, so there is an argument for waiting until then.
	The Committee has done good and thorough work on the Bill, and I congratulate the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) on that. I also congratulate the hon. Member for North Norfolk on bringing forward and promoting the Bill as he has done. I shall not oppose its Third Reading, and I think that the House should allow it to proceed. However, it is important that we allow the views of those who oppose it to be aired and placed on the record, not least so that if those views, however alarmist or lurid they might seem, should later prove to have been justified, there will be something to refer back to. If necessary, we could revisit the issue with new legislation.
	It is worth stressing the point about national parks, because several hon. Members have talked about national parks as though the broads area were one, but it is notas the hon. Member for North Norfolk correctly pointed out. There is a reason for that, which is clear from looking at the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 and Lord Sandford's review of national parks in the early 1970s. National parks have two basic purposes: conservation of the natural environment and providing the public with access to those areas. If there is a conflict between those aimsor, I should say, if it is not possible by skilful management to reconcile themconservation should come first. However, the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act 1988 makes it clear that there are three purposes for the authority:
	conserving and enhancing the natural beauty of the Broads...promoting the enjoyment of the Broads by the public...and protecting the interests of navigation.
	So, from the Act's inception, it has always been agreed that protecting the interests of navigation was an explicit statutory principle which, because of the Sandford principles, excluded the possibility of the Broads Authority being a national park.
	The central fear underlying the concerns that have been expressed to us and to the Committee by petitioners, is that, as a result of the Bill, navigation could be compromised and could end up taking a back seat to conservation and wildlife, when in fact the ever-present need to balance all these factors is precisely the reason why the broads are not a national park.

Richard Bacon: The navigation committee has an extremely important role to play, and I fear that Broads Authority has not exactly covered itself in glory by the way in which it has proposed changes to the committee's membership. In fact, it is fair to say that the Broads Authority was a little careless, to put it kindly, to have acted in such a way that it now finds that many navigators do not trust it. I know that the authority has gone some way towards allaying the navigators' concerns. The hon. Member for North Norfolk mentioned the Royal Yachting Association, the British Marine Federation and the Inland Waterways Association.
	However, the hon. Gentleman did not mention the Norfolk and Suffolk Boating Association or the Norfolk Broads Yacht Cluband for good reason. Although discussions took place with the Norfolk and Suffolk Boating Association, it has expressed certain fears since the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire met. I should like to quote one of the petitioners, Mr. Philip Ollier, the executive secretary of the Norfolk and Suffolk Boating Association. In an e-mail this year, he wrote:
	In September 2007, the Broads Authority Chief Executive brought forward proposals to alter the way appointments are made to the Navigation Committee.
	It is worth noting that that was written in September, after the Committee of the House had considered the Bill. Mr. Ollier goes on to say:
	Previously eight places on the committee were allocated to persons nominated by bodies representing the various navigation interests.
	The charge made is that
	The process will be open to manipulation by the BA Executive and follows similar changes that have been implemented to reduce the representation of navigation interests on the Broads Authority itself. Given the changes to the composition of the Navigation Committee, the assurances obtained in the negotiations about the Bill start to look less reliable.
	A constituent of mine, Mr. Graham Trimmer from Poringland, has expressed his fears in even more colourful terms. Referring to the issue of public safety, he said:
	the Chairman of the Broads Authority appears to suggest...that the Bill is only about public safety. This is a smokescreen, since adequate byelaws were enacted and came into force in April last year, allowing for the enforcement of a comprehensive boat safety scheme.
	I have spoken to some of the people in my constituency who own boats, and some of them have told me that they would not be able to get a licence from the Broads Authority had they not already been through the process of getting a boat safety certificate.
	These are examples of people's concerns about the Bill. I fear that the way in which the authority has conducted itselfeven to the extent of supposedly entering into legal agreements with the concerned bodieshas, in the words of the Committee, created a legal ambiguity, and perhaps created more problems than it has solved. When I first heard about the legal agreements that were being entered into, I wondered how it was possible to enter into such an agreement with a third party in relation to a Bill that had not yet been passed. I wondered what possible effect those agreements could have in law, in terms of the subsequent powers of the authority, given that the Bill had not yet been passed. Indeed, the Committee appears to agree about that. Paragraph 9 of its report to the House states:
	It is our view that such agreements would not have any legal effect as they could not be seen to fetter the discretion given to the Authority in the legislation once the Bill was enacted.
	I will not dwell on the issue of direct elections, as it has already been referred to, save to comment that it is a sensible principle to explore. Where an authority has planning powers, as this one does, it seems quite wrong that there should be no directly elected input if a way can be found to achieve that.
	I fear that the authority's approach has not enabled the House to give it the warm cross-party endorsement that it might otherwise have had, and serious concerns among our constituents remain. That said, there will be further opportunities in the other place. As the hon. Member for North Norfolk said, the ultimate test will be the behaviour of the authority in interpreting and using its powers in the years ahead. If the fears of the navigators prove justified, we will know soon enough, and we will have the opportunity to do something about it in due course.

Keith Simpson: I will try to keep my comments brief. The Bill was blocked last year by my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) and myselfnot to destroy it, but to enable the fears of some of our constituents to be aired on the Floor of the House. Many of the issues have already been well presented by the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who steered the Bill through the Commons, and by other colleagues. I shall not go over all the detail again.
	It is ironic that we are now 20 years on from the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads BillI emphasise the term Suffolkthat was steered through the House by my predecessor, Richard Ryder, now Lord Ryder of Wensum. As a consequence of our previous debates, the first and now the second blocking motion, the work of the Committee and the Bill's consideration in the other place, it is hoped that the relevant issues will be addressed. I remind you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that the very nature of the Bill has changed. The original conception was to establish the broads as a national park, but that Bill had to be withdrawn for lots of reasons. One is that the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act 1988 was legislation for navigation, so establishing the broads as a national park would cause all kinds of problems, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk said.
	The Norfolk and Suffolk broads are a hybrid. That is the key issue; in many respects, they are a one-off. I shall not deal with detailed issues of navigation, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk has already done so. We aired those issues widely in our debate of a year ago. I want to touch on another issue that was raised then and has been raised again today by the hon. Member for North Norfolkthe whole business of having some directly elected members on the board. I am not going to go into the different permutations of how it might be done. I am almost surprised that an alternative vote system was not proposed, but the key issue is a matter of principle. Ironically, it is more important today than it was when we debated it in April. It is crucial, because local people feel that they should be represented on a board and able to affect their communities, their livelihoods, and the nature of the broads itself, directly.
	Many of us were in Westminster Hall yesterday morning to participate in a debate that I was fortunate enough to obtain on flood defences in Norfolk. One of the issues raised there was that various Government advisory boards could put forward proposals that would have a direct impact on communities in north and mid-Norfolk. Ultimately, actions over the next 50 years or beyond could change the very nature of the broads, but I am not going to go down that path in any more detail. However, the fact that local communities feel they do not have a say is of fundamental importance, and all Norfolk Members seized upon that.
	Two Members have raised another important point. The boundary committee is looking into unitary authority reorganisation in Norfolk. The hon. Member for North Norfolk and my hon. Friends the Members for South Norfolk and for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) suggested that as a consequence of the committee's work there could very well be changes in the make-up of local government in Norfolk. Interestingly, paragraph 3.1 of the proposals that will go before the committee later this week say:
	Although the Broads Authority is not included in the review, clearly the likely reduction in the number of constituent local authorities will lead to a further change.
	The assumption that this will go through is a big assumption, not least becausethis directly relates to the representation on the Broads Authoritythere is no way in which the people of Norfolk can make their views clear about any possible reorganisation of local government in Norfolk. Consultations and stakeholders are mentioned, but there is no way in which the people can make their views clear. Whatever line one takes on whether there should be unitary authorities, it is unarguably the case that there has been no test of public opinion. That reinforces the view of many people in Norfolk that there should be directly elected representatives on the Broads Authority. I agree with the hon. Member for North Norfolk that all the advice we receive is that the Bill cannot be amended to provide for that. We know that the Minister will consider this issue, and, given that the Norfolk and Suffolk broads are a hybrid, I urge him to think of a way in which the natural concerns of Members and our constituents can be met.

Ian Gibson: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that although it is true that the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act 1988 does not allow for direct elections, there areI am toldfacilities within it whereby there can be change in terms of local authorities changing, which would take away the heat about unitary status?

Anne McIntosh: It is both interesting and an honour to participate in this good and stimulating debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), on promoting the Bill, and the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor), although he is absent. Obviously, the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) has been the most affected by this matter, but I took some comfort from the clarity with which my hon. Friends the Members for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) and for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) explained some of the issues.
	My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk, in particular, set out most clearly what the purposes and functions of the Bill and the Broads Authority are. I believe he said that there are three purposes: to conserve and enhance the natural beauty of the broads; to enhance the enjoyment of the broads; and to protect the interests of navigation on the broads. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk on securing yesterday's excellent Adjournment debate in order to discuss what an amenity the broads are, and what enjoyment they provide nationally; we are not just talking about the community of Norfolk and Suffolkpredominately Norfolkbut the larger community. Those things could be put at risk.
	The Bill will update the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act 1988, giving the Broads Authority various new powers. The Bill will combine the navigation and general accounts into one. It will enable the authority to do, among other things, the following: to apply effectively the national boat safety scheme to reduce the risk of fire and explosion; to introduce compulsory third-party insurance for boats in its area; to license hire boats; to give the Haddiscoe Cut a public right of navigation; to make possible the transfer of responsibility for the navigation on Breydon Water from the Great Yarmouth port authority; to make a voluntary agreement to manage water skiing and to distinguish between water skiing and wakeboarding so they can be managed separately; to control pollution from boats; to remove the requirement for a separate Norwich navigation officer; and to widen the range of bodies involved in the appointment of members to the authority by the Secretary of State. As the hon. Member for North Norfolk said, real safety issues are involved.
	Perhaps this is an opportune moment to record my interest in this matter. I always try to attend boat shows whenever possible. Two years ago, I was fortunate enough to go to the Southampton boat show, and over the past year or two I have been fortunate enough to attend the London boat show. It is magnificent to see some of the vessels that ply the broads and the impact that boat building has on the whole of East Anglia. As I represented Essex North East and Essex North and Suffolk South in the European Parliament for 10 years, I regularly visited some of the boat builders, who contribute hugely to the local economy. We should not lose sight of that fact.
	This is a good opportunity not only to congratulate the sponsor of the Bill, who moved the Third Reading eloquently, but to have regard to a number of the issues that have been raised and were objected to earlier. I pay tribute to colleagues who served on the Committee on the Broads Authority Bill, not only the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire, whom I mentioned, but my hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb), my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge), who has become quite an expert in these matters, and the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire, North (Jim Sheridan). As a number of hon. Members have said, we should recognise that many of the concerns have been translated into amendments that have been incorporated into the Bill.
	All hon. Members who have spoken mentioned democratic accountability. I represent only a small section of the North Yorkshire Moors national park, so I am not a great authority on it, butas the hon. Member for North Norfolk saidon some occasions those who serve in the public interest in that regard plough a lonely furrow.
	The special report concluded that while the Bill should be allowed to proceed, several caveats were raised in Committee and were set out in the report. The promoters of the Bill tabled several amendments, and the one that is outstanding relates to the lack of democratic accountability. In paragraph 10, the Committee concluded forcefully that, in its view
	the Broads Authority and local people would benefit from the provision for direct elections to the Authority with a view to ensuring that the principle of direct representation of local community interests should be guaranteed. This would ensure that the Authority could be held to account and that there was a democratic means of moderating the powers enacted within the Bill.
	I listened carefully to what my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk said. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk also recorded his view that the public will have no truck with bodies that do not have some form of electoral representation and democratic accountability. We cannot emphasise that forcefully enough.
	My main question for the Minister, with regard to paragraphs 10 and 11 of the special report and having heard the views expressed so eloquently today, is whether he will give the House an assurance that the Government are minded to table an amendment in the other place at an early stage to address that omission from the Bill. We have heard about that omission from the sponsor and from other hon. Members in this debate. The sponsorthe hon. Member for Norwich, Northsaid that a compromise appears to have been reached on the model in Scotland. Is that the model that the Minister will follow?
	We wish to give the Bill a fair wind today, but we respect the caveats that were raised by the Committee. We take heed of those issues that have been raised today, and we should have regard to the fact that the broads have a unique place in the affections of the British, as well as in the local economy. Does the Minister believe that all three functionsthe general and special directions to vessels, the insurance questions and the appeals procedureare all set out clearly in the Bill? Is he satisfied that there is a balance between the three functions I mentioned earlierto conserve and enhance the natural beauty of the broads, to enhance the enjoyment of the broads, and to protect the interests of navigation?
	One final issue concerns the licensing of rescue boats. While the Committee was agreeable to that being removed from the Bill, for the reasons of safety that several hon. Members have mentioned, could the Minister put our minds at rest about whether that issue will be considered in the other place?
	I take great heart from the debate today, having seen in my own area how planning issues work in national parks. It is absolutely right that democracy should be seen to work. People should be seen to have a voice and a say. If they were to elect a proportion of those who serve on the Broads Authority, and if they did not like what they did, they could remove them when they were due for re-election. At the moment, that is not possible. If the Minister could explain to us where he and his Department think that they are going on that, we would make great progress.
	I have enjoyed listening to the arguments, as I did not participate in previous proceedings. In its own way, the Bill is important. I completely understand the reasons for which my hon. Friends sought to object to the Bill. I understand not only that proceedings have been going on since the original Bill in 1988, but that people have been trying to move proceedings forward on this Bill since 2003. It is incumbent on us to make progress today, as the hon. Member for Norwich, North said, but it is also incumbent on the Minister to set out how he will proceed, particularly on the question of direct elections to the authority.

Jonathan R Shaw: I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), the sponsor of the Bill, on how he has brought forward the arguments and presented the discussions, both in the House and outside it in the various communities in and around the Norfolk and Suffolk broads. I thank all hon. Members from both sides of the House, as it has been a measured debate in which people have expressed concerns on behalf of their constituents, as is right.
	It is also important for us to appreciate the general nature of the broads and of national parks. The broads are part of the national parks family and every citizen in this nation has a stake in those wonderful areas. The work undertaken by many members of those authorities is appreciated. People work hard in the interest of those authorities, and they take their responsibilities seriously. We are grateful for their efforts.
	I endorse the comments made by my predecessor on Second Reading. As the Minister responsible for the national parks and the broads, I confirm that the Government remain firmly supportive of the aims of the Broads Authority Bill. Let me emphasise the wider support given to the broads. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was able to announce a three-year funding settlement in 2008-09, which gave the Norfolk broads 4.304 million poundsa cash increase of 115 per cent. over the past 10 years. Our commitment is on the record. That amount will rise to 4.4 million by 2010-11 and further in the future. We will also provide special grants of 500,000 for 2008-09 and 400,000 for 2009-10 and 2010-11, which will specifically enable the authority to implement its sediment restoration strategy and restore the broads' ecosystems. The authority has taken direct control of dredging the rivers and broads, a move that it is anticipated will enable it to achieve 25 per cent. more dredging than last year for the same amount of money. That is good news for toll payers and for taxpayers.
	I am aware that the Bill has already been the subject not only of an earlier debate but of scrutiny by the Select Committee. My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) is no longer in his seat, but all hon. Members have paid tribute to him and to the members of the Committee for the good service that they gave to the House through that process. It is not surprising that any changes to our most protected landscapes will invariably raise concerns, but I am delighted that we are in general agreement on both sides of the House. It is right, is it not, that we should raise concerns about such wonderful landscapes? Hon. Members have said that the Bill should be subject to scrutiny. I endorse those remarks.
	The main aim of the Bill is to improve safety on the broads, through measures that include the licensing of hire craft, compulsory third-party insurance and improvements to the way that the Broads Authority operates. The introduction of the boat safety scheme is already ensuring that vessels are properly maintained. British Waterways and the Environment Agency already operate the scheme successfully, and I congratulate the Broads Authority on the measures that it has taken to bring the broads into line with the other major navigation authorities.
	I am aware that some people consider that the Bill's safety provisions could be dealt with through byelaws, but I do not agree. It would be impossible to use byelaws to introduce compulsory insurance, as it would be too cumbersome to amend them each time there was a change in standards.
	I turn now to some of the questions raised in the debate, after which I shall deal with the subject of direct elections. The hon. Member for North Norfolk asked various questions about insurance, but I think that I answered them all earlier. The proposal to merge the general and navigation funds is a technical measure, and the Bill ensures that the Broads Authority will give a clear account of what has been spent on navigation and on other purposes.
	The hon. Member for North Norfolk also asked about the duty of the Broads Authority to consult the navigation committee. In its latest form, the Bill does not remove that duty. He also asked about the right of free navigation. That was included in one of the petitions to the Committee, which considered that the powers were necessary. The hon. Gentleman was concerned that protecting the interests of navigation could result in Sandford by stealth, but it will not. The broads' three purposes remain as set out in the 1988 Act, and this Bill does not change that.
	The hon. Member for North Norfolk also asked about the boat safety scheme. As I said, it would be too cumbersome to use byelaws for that purpose, as the Department would have to approve each amendment to them. He asked about changes to the navigation revenue account, which now returns to what it was before 2005-06. Some dredging can be for purposes other than navigation.
	Some concern has been expressed about the relationship between the Broads Authority and communities in the area. The hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) was especially interested in that and, as he said, the true test will be how the Broads Authority is judged to have used that relationship. Important safeguards in that respect are in place: the Broads Authority is accountable to the Audit Commission and to the local government ombudsman, and the broads forum is another way of keeping it in touch with local user groups.
	The hon. Member for North Norfolk began his discussion of direct elections by quoting a newspaper that agreed with him. Perhaps he issued a press release saying that the  Eastern Daily Press agreed with him and the newspaper printed that, but it was interesting to hear a Liberal Democrat speaking in favour of a first-past-the-post system. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will clarify whether he is in favour of that system for the Broads Authority. It is a very important point.

David Hanson: I beg to move, That this House does not insist on its disagreement with the Lords in their amendments Nos. 9, 301 and 327.
	We had a full debate yesterday on the question of suspended sentence orders, and there was some discussion between the main parties and the Liberal Democrats on this matter. Obviously, I regret the fact that the other place has voted in the way that it has, but there is clearly a big disagreement between the two Houses.
	I am firmly of the view that the impact of the clause was positive, but a number of points have been made by the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) and the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth), and also by such august bodies as the Magistrates Association, and what they have said, coupled with the reflection we have had from the Lords, means that we will not press this issue to a Division this evening.
	Members know that we are addressing key issues in relation to the prison officers' right-to-strike provisions, which expire under the joint industrial relations procedural arrangement tomorrow8 May. I have always had the intention of getting this Bill to Royal Assent by 8 May, and I feel that if we press this issue this evening we will severely complicate those matters. Therefore, I beg to move that we do not insist on the disagreement with the Lords, and I hope that the hon. and learned Member for Harborough, for whom I have had great regard during the passage of the Bill, and the hon. Member for Cambridge, will accept that with the good grace that I know they have within them.

Edward Garnier: I am delighted that the Government have accepted the advice of the other place. I know it is not always easy for a Government with a majority in this House to accept such advice on all occasions, but the other place can proudly claim to have exercised its constitutional role properly on this occasion, by inviting a Government to take advice. They have clearly listened to the advice of the other place. I claim no credit for any part in the Government's decision making; we have all had to do what we have had to do. It happens that the House of Lords' advice coincides with the remarks that I have been making, but that is a coincidence.
	I thank the right hon. Gentleman, the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle), for the constructive view that they have taken on this particular proposal, and I invite the House, including my right hon. and hon. Friends, to accept the concession that the Government have made this evening in the face of the advice of the other place. I ask us all to allow clause 10 to be deleted from the Bill.

Maria Eagle: I beg to move, That this House does not insist on its disagreement with the Lords in their amendment No. 285.
	I am pleased that at least we will have an offence of inciting hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation on the statute book. That is very positive, and everybody in the House should be pleased about, as I am. It is a necessary provision.
	The other place has insisted on its amendment, and I can advise the House that the Government will not resist it. We had a full debate yesterday, when there was a frank exchange of views. Perhaps not as much consensus emerged at the end as we might have hoped, although the vote was quite largethere was a 202 majority. We remain of the view that the amendment is undesirable and unnecessary; it does not add anything to the law as it would stand without its inclusion. However, as the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), has explained, there is an urgent need for the Bill to receive Royal Assent.
	I say to the House that between now and commencement we will prepare guidancewe had an extensive debate yesterday about guidance and its importanceexplaining the operation of the new offences, taking into account the views and concerns expressed across this House and in the other place. Of course there will be an opportunitydoubtless there will be frequent opportunitiesto revisit the issue in due course if it is the will of this House or the other House to do so. On that basis, I would like to propose that we do not disagree with the Lords in their said amendment.

David Howarth: I fully agree. Anyone who was standing at the Bar in the Lords today, as I was, will fully accept that point and agree with the hon. Gentleman. If there was ever a circumstance in which people's words were different from their meaning, it was in the other place this afternoon.
	I accept that there is a problem that has to be dealt with. It is the problem of the misinterpretation by the police of existing law, which has led to some ludicrous investigations. It should be said that those investigations took place under the Public Order Acts, which use completely different wordsthey talk about threatening, abusive or insulting language rather than threats alone, which are the words of the proposed offence.
	Nevertheless, there might be a problem. The question is about the right way to deal with that problem. The Government offered a way to do that today through the use of statutory guidancea proposal, as I said yesterday, with a good deal of merit. It was rejected by the House of Lords when they accepted the Waddington amendment. It is a sensible way of approaching the question.
	In addition, a proposal was put forward yesterday by the Liberal Democrats and, in a different way, by the Conservatives, to add some procedural protection under which the Attorney-General or the prosecution authorities, whoever they might be in the future, would have to have special regard to freedom of expression or, in the case of the Conservative proposal, to quite a few other human rights, too, before deciding to bring a prosecution. As I said yesterday, that is an important protection. It is not merely meaningless words, and it provides at least some hope of judicial review in some circumstances.
	Our view is that the right way to deal with the problem of the absurd investigations would be a combination of the Government's proposals on guidance and one of the procedural protections proposed by my party and the Conservative party. I deeply regret the fact that the Government have not chosen to go down that route. They had the opportunity to accept that route tonight, at this late stage. They chose not to, because of the lateness of the hour and the political circumstances in which they find themselves. I should remind the Government that they decided to add to the Bill the provisions about industrial relations in the prison system. They could have chosen a different way to do things. The Bill is full of far too many clauses on different issues that have been being dealt with for far too long. In terms of good legislative practice, it is near to being a disaster. On the offence that we are discussing, my party believes that tonight the Government have caved in to forces to which they should never contemplate caving in.

Evan Harris: I should like to support my hon. Friend's amendment (a), which he wishes to pursue, and to identify and discuss the three reasons why the Government find themselves in an unsatisfactory position. Two of their problems are self-inflicted, but one is a genuine problem that we discussed yesterday.
	The first self-inflicted problem relates to the timetable that they set themselves with regard to the prison officers issue, which has already been discussed. There were alternative ways of going about the matter. It is unfortunate that the Government are accepting a good offence being made worse because of the timetable. The second problem concerns their failure to win the vote in the House of Lords. If Members read the  Hansard of both occasions, they will see that the argument was won, but the vote was not.
	The first time that the amendment tabled by Lord Waddington and his colleagues saw the light of day, the Government insisted on the House of Lords sitting late into the night, but regrettably they could muster only 57 people when the vote came. They lost by 81 votes to 57. The turnout was better tonight; I understand that the vote was 178 to 168, and that a significant number of Government Members were there. That is laudable, but as the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) said, 13 Government Members still voted for the amendment. I am pleased to say that the Liberal Democrats in the other place were far more cohesive. I understand that none of them voted for the amendment. Given the numbers, the matter was in the Government's hands; they could have prevented us from being in this position, and it is regrettable that they failed.
	The issue of significance is the widespread concern, which I and other colleagues yesterday accepted exists, about the misapplication by the police of existing offences that threaten freedom of expression. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle) kindly offered to meet us to discuss whether guidance could be provided, not just on the new offence that we are discussingI was pleased to hear her say that she still intends to produce guidance on that offencebut on sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which have caused widespread concern.
	It is acceptable and understandable for Members of this House to express concern about whether freedom of speech is unreasonably threatened by legislation, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) set out, the offence of hatred on the ground of sexual orientation is very narrow. There is no doubt about the offence; the only doubt is introduced by Lords amendment No. 285. It will create more problems than it seeks to solve. The lesson is that although we must be vigilant about free speech, we must go about things in a more deliberative way.
	I ask the Government to consider thinking more deeply about freedom of expression and whether there could be a review of where we are now, so that we can ensure that the police, the prosecutors and the public know what they can do, and so that concerns are not expressed, as they were yesterday, about whether strongly held views that are offensive will be subject to the criminal law. I hope that the Government will recognise that the problem may come back again, unless there is clarity on that point; this is the second time that they have found themselves in difficulty on the issue.
	I make one final point. We Liberal Democrats are keen to preserve freedom of expression, as can be seen in our amendment (a). I recognise that there is support among Conservative Members for freedom of expression. However, I note that more than 50 Conservative Members voted last night to maintain our blasphemy laws. That is inconsistent of them. I regret the fact that we are in this position, and I will certainly vote in protest at the fact that we have not had the opportunity to register that regret.

Martin Horwood: I am very grateful; I was listening to the debate from another location. The Minister says that the examination in public took account of many hundreds of submissions. However, in an area called Leckhampton, which straddles the boundary between the constituency of the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson) and my own, potentially up to 1,300 extra homes have been approved for building on land that is waterlogged as we speak. That development, which will increase flooding in parts of both my and the hon. Gentleman's constituency downhill, has been approved despite hundreds of objections from local people. In effect, those unelected inspectors have made this decision with no democratic accountability. If the Minister will not answer questions on this strategy, where are we to ask them and how are we to challenge this decision making?